Japanese electronics firm NEC has developed a handheld device that enables a user to chat in another language without memorising any words or phrases themselves, and it is likely to be launched in Japan in the next few months.

The system consists of three components – a speech recognition engine, translation software and a voice generator, and is about the same size of a normal mobile and converts spoken Japanese to English and vice versa.

Spoken English or Japanese is recognised and converted into text by the speech recognition engine. The text is then converted from Japanese to English or the other way by translation software and the resulting text is vocalised by a voice synthesiser, and the entire process takes about one second.

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