Japan's Narita Airport Previews Speech-to-Speech Translation App

Narita International Airport in Japan has begun testing a speech-to-speech translation application on shuttle buses running between two terminals and hopes to be able to roll it out across the entire airport by the time the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games take place.

Called NariTra, the free multilingual translation app was created by the airport using a multilingual speech translation engine developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. It also employs noise-canceling techniques and recognizes a wide range of speech.

The app can provide speech-to-speech translations between Japanese and English, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian. It also supports text-to-text translation in these languages, as well as in Thai, French, and Spanish.

The smartphone app supports both iOS and Android devices.

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