Jibbigo App Top Seller in Japan
Mountain View, CA - On January 26th, Jibbigo released a bi-directional Japanese-English version of their iPhone-based speech-to-speech translation system. This App quickly became the number one grossing App in Japan and the most downloaded travel application. The Japanese-English system significantly lowers the communication barrier for native English speakers traveling to Japan and helps Japanese travelers when they are overseas.
A recent prime-time television show in Japan, "Mezamashi Doyobi", attempted to gauge the usability of Jibbigo by providing it to a visitor from the UK and following him around Japan for a day. Using Jibbigo, the non-Japanese speaking visitor was able to interact naturally with Japanese locals in various regions in Japan highlighting the effectiveness of the system.
"We are excited to see the response from users in Japan. The success of the app for Japanese-English communication is indicative of how successful the application will be for other uses, especially as we are working on domains in disaster response in other languages,” said Dr. Ian Lane, System Scientist with the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been involved in the development of numerous speech translation systems, both research systems and commercial products including Jibbigo.
Jibbigo is developed by Mobile Technologies, a start-up founded by Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Alex Waibel. Team members include recent graduates and researchers from InterACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Mobile Technologies newest research office on the Silicon Valley campus has played an integral role in developing the Jibbigo system.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
