PSP Talkman

Just another way in which Sony makes life more interesting. The Sony PSP Talkman helps you break down the barriers of language and communication. Unfortunately, it’s only awesome if you’re in Japan – for the moment – since that’s the only place it’s currently available.

A US release is not “in sight” for now, but there’s always the future. Someone with a time machine (or psychic powers) can tell us when it might actually make it to the rest of the world. In the meantime, it’s always good to be informed.

Here’s some details from Lik Sang:

Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you’re not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft’s speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarine) and Korean.

The cool thing is that you can go either way with Talk and Game mode, English > Japanese, Japanese > English, Korean > Chinese, etc.

Talkman ships for just US$ 69.90, including a stylish USB microphone and will turn your PSP into a translation and learning machine, wrapped in a fun, game-like presentation!

They’ve also mentioned rumors of someone in Germany setting off to work on a European version, but there is no official confirmation that this is true.