Fujitsu launches diversity communication tool LiveTalk, with multilingual translation functionality

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Fujitsu Ltd and Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory Ltd have announced the addition of multilingual translation functionality to Fujitsu Software LiveTalk, a participatory communication tool for the hearing-impaired.

The product is called Diversity Communication Tool. LiveTalk is software that recognizes what a speaker is saying in situations such as a corporate meeting or a lesson in school and instantly displays the spoken words as text on multiple devices, enabling real-time communication for everyone, including those with hearing impairments. The previous version of LiveTalk only supported the Japanese language, but now, with multilingual speech recognition and support for an AI-equipped translation engine, Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory’s proprietary technology includes functionality to immediately display translations as text on screen.

With this addition, LiveTalk enables real-time communication not only for communicating with people with hearing disabilities, but also between multiple languages. Fujitsu and Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory are making LiveTalk available in order to facilitate communication between diverse groups in a variety of situations, including information booths at international event venues and tourist sites, or business meetings where multiple languages are spoken.

Background

Since LiveTalk was launched in May 2015, it has been adopted as a communication-support tool for people with hearing disabilities by some 100 businesses, hospitals, government offices, and educational institutions, in order to provide reasonable accommodation(1) for people with hearing disabilities. In November 2016, Fujitsu strengthened the functionality of LiveTalk in order to increase usability, adding support for mobile devices, so that it could more easily be used anywhere, and by adopting a cloud-based speech recognition engine with a high degree of recognition accuracy.

As Japan looks to host a variety of international events in the coming years, there is growing interest in ways to remove barriers to communication between languages. Likewise, companies are doing more business on a global level, and have a growing need for products and services that support communication among international staff.