1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to personal devices for recording personal experiences and providing personal instruction including translations of foreign languages.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Travelers have always needed the guidance of some local authority in order to find their ways through foreign lands. There are traditionally native guides that can help travelers find food and lodging as well as pointing out local attractions and points of interest. As with any other field of human endeavor, certain of these guides may have been found to be motivated by interests other than those which were best for the client, as when some may serve to deflect tourists to establishments which hire the guides for this purpose. It is also impossible for every guide to be uniformly well-informed and reliable. As it is sometimes difficult to determine which of these guides may be trustworthy, some travelers resort to packaged tours with escorts that shepherd groups of tourists about. Other travelers may rely on tour books, which have the advantage of being at least generally knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects of local interest. However, they are naturally mass produced, and therefore not tailored to any one individual, and certainly they are not interactive with the user, as a human guide would be.
Travelers have also become more and more fond of documenting their journeys, and tend to carry increasing numbers of still and video cameras, journals and log books with them.
Travelers also often need the assistance of translators which can interpret the number of signs, menu listings, and printed materials they will encounter in their travels. Although there are computer programs that can be used to recognize optical characters, and even translate materials from one language to another, these currently require equipment such as a flat-bed scanner, and a personal computer or at least a laptop computer to be effective, and are not well suited for a traveler, who may be having trouble just handling his or her luggage.
Thus, there is a need for a travel assistant device which combines many of these features in a compact unit, which can aid in translating printed material without bulky or complicated equipment, which can be used to document a traveler's journeys and which can provide detailed instruction and commentary to aid the traveler on his way.
A preferred embodiment of the present invention is a travel assistant device, which includes a hard disk drive including at least one database, a digital camera, a microphone, a display screen, and at least one speaker. The hard disk drive is provided with database software by which images and sound input from the digital camera and the microphone are stored in the hard disk drive as a personal log database. Images and sound files can be displayed on the display screen and through the speaker, and the personal log database may be updated by additional commentary and images as desired. The database software also retrieves downloaded database information which includes images, sound files and text which act as a travel instructor. Also preferably included is a portable translator module.
The portable translator module uses the hard disk drive with a translation database. The digital camera inputs graphic images of words in a language unfamiliar to the user, and an Optical Character Recognition engine which resides on said hard disk drive, takes input graphic images of words in a language unfamiliar to the user and converts them to characters in the unfamiliar language. A dictionary module then takes the characters generated by the Optical Character Recognition engine and produces translated files in a language familiar to the user, and outputs them to the user through the screen and speaker.
It is an advantage of the present invention that it combines a number of devices in one package, so that there are fewer separate devices to handle while traveling.
It is another advantage of the present invention that a Hard Disk Drive device can carry significantly more information than a paper tour guide, and thus also minimizes the numbers of items that a traveler must carry.
It is a further advantage of the present invention that by including a Global Positioning System, the user is allowed to get interactive information from digital guides, and may allow the user to be tracked or located if he becomes lost.
It is still another advantage of the present invention that it can provide translations of signs and printed matter by use of an internal dictionary and OCR functions, and new dictionaries or travel guides can be downloaded to match the location and circumstances of the traveler.
It is yet another advantage of the present invention that it can act as a personal log to record events of a user's travels in a digital form which can be uploaded to external memory devices or websites.
It is an advantage of the present invention that it can provide personalized directions and commentary for the instructions of the traveler, and can record additional commentary for the traveler.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will no doubt become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading the following detailed description which makes reference to the several figures of the drawing.
The following drawings are not made to scale as an actual device, and are provided for illustration of the invention described herein.
A preferred embodiment of the present invention is a digital travel assistant. As illustrated in the various drawings herein, and particularly in the view of
Travelers to foreign lands have always needed the guidance of some local authority in order to find their ways.
Output files and formats can include various types of graphic and text files 58, which are retrieved from a searchable database 34. HTML pages 60 can also be sent to the internet after an internal software utility (not shown) stored in the HDD 26, such as an HTML editor, has been used to format and mount the graphic image 52 and sound files received by the travel assistant 10. These could be presented as updates to a personal web site displaying “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”, etc.
Also available for output are MPEG movie files 62, digital image and sound files 64 of various formats including voice data, and it is also possible that these files be included in the web pages 60 or that the web pages contain links to locations on a server after they have been uploaded from the travel assistant 10.
The output is done through several methods. The sound files such as voice 64 and digital music 56 can be output through the built-in speaker 24 and digital images 64 and MPEG movies 62 can be shown on the screen 14 which is preferably an LCD display 16. These files can also be output through conventional, ports such as USB ports, etc. or modems, of either cable or wireless type.
With continuing reference to
The image data 52 held in Ram 70 is then introduced to the OCR software 32 and compared to internal dictionary software 42, which produces a match with the characters in the image 52, and retrieves corresponding translated image 74 and voice files 76, which are delivered to a second device RAM memory 78. The translated image files 74 are delivered to the display screen 16, and text is processed by a text-to-speech engine 82, which produces a translated sound file 76 which is then delivered to the speakers 24.
Thus, the characters 102 produce a request 72 to be translated which produces a reply 80, which includes image files 74 such as a slide 104, which could contain English word translations 106, with phonetic pronunciation information 108, or could produce pictures. The speaker 24 can then play back the sound files 76.
When used as a travel instructor device 200, a database 202 is accessed for specific information about the travel's present or intended location, or to give directions or commentary to the travel. The travel instructor device 200 can be activated by commands entered through a touch-screen 84 which presents various options to the user. One possible scenario involves the user's planned visit to a friend “Jack” who lives in Japan. Jack may have sent prerecorded instructions and directions to his house, which have been stored in a database #26 on the traveler's HDD 26. When the traveler arrives in the appropriate city in Japan, she may access database #26 by the touch-screen display 84, which sends a query 86 to the central processor 88, which is stored in device RAM memory 70 until the database software 36 retrieves the appropriate database 34, in this case database #26 202, which includes images, voice and text information included on digital image and voice files 64. These files 64 are sent to device RAM memory 78 where image 52 and voice 92 data are sent to the display screen 14 and speakers 24 respectively, or certain text files 90 may be sent to the text-to-speech engine 82 for processing into voice files 92 which are then sent to the speakers 24.
Thus, Jack's directions could include an image of a local landmark 204, with his pre-recorded comment 206 “Turn right at this red shrine and go towards the book store . . . ” The travel assistant's recording function through the microphone 22 and digital camera 20 also allows the traveler to add extra comments 208, perhaps for future reference, such as “This shrine isn't red!” These comments and images can be added to the database #26 202 and stored on the HDD 26.
Referring now primarily to
As before, it is possible that a touch screen button (not shown) has previously be activated to initiate this series of events and to identify that the image is to be used for logging purposes.
The digital image and voice files 64 are sent to the HDD 26, where database software 36 routes the data to the database 34, which is specifically a logging database 304. The data is stored there until retrieved and the digital image and voice files 64 are called to be played back. If so, these files 64 are sent to device RAM memory 78 where image 52 and voice 92 data are sent to the display screen 14 and speakers 24 respectively, or certain text files 90 may be sent to the text-to-speech engine 82 for processing into voice files 92 which are then sent to the speakers 24.
Alternately, the digital image and voice files 64 can be exported 306 either to another external device, or to the web 308 in the form of digital image and voice files 64, or MPEG movies 310.
While the present invention has been shown and described with regard to certain preferred embodiments, it is to be understood that modifications in form and detail will no doubt be developed by those skilled in the art upon reviewing this disclosure. It is therefore intended that the following claims cover all such alterations and modifications that nevertheless include the true spirit and scope of the inventive features of the present invention.