The development of multi-channel digital broadcasting has generated a demand not only for new services but also for smart and highly functional capabilities in all broadcast-related devices. This is especially true of TV receivers on the viewer's side. With the aim of achieving a friendly interface that anybody can use with ease, we built a prototype spoken dialogue interface for TV operation based on data collected by using Wizard of Oz method. At the current stage of our research, we are using this system to investigate the usefulness and problem areas of an interactive voice interface for TV operation.

This study aims to propose a novel traveling-wave series-fed microstrip array antenna and its design. The proposed antenna has two features: additional slits placed on the output side of the antenna element are introduced as a new degree of freedom to control the radiation power from each element. Also, the unequal element spacing is applied to compensate passing phases of each antenna element; meander lines that would increase the insertion loss are not used. A 9-element linear array is designed and tested, and the simulated and measured results agree, thus validating the proposed design.

We present a novel circularly polarized ring microstrip antenna and its design. The shorting pins discretely disposed on the inner edge of the ring microstrip antenna are introduced as a new degree of freedom for improving the resonance frequency control. The number and diameter of the shorting pins control the resonance frequency; the resonance frequency can be almost constant with respect to the inner/outer diameter ratio, which expands the use of the ring microstrip antenna. The dual-band antenna where the proposed antenna includes another ring microstrip antenna is designed and measured, and simulated results agree well with the measured one.

There is a strong demand to expand captioned broadcasting for TV news programs in Japan. However, keyboard entry of captioned manuscripts for news program cannot keep pace with the speed of speech, because in the case of Japanese it takes time to select the correct characters from among homonyms. In order to implement simultaneous subtitled broadcasting for Japanese news programs, a simultaneous subtitling system by speech recognition has been developed. This system consists of a real-time speech recognition system to handle broadcast news transcription and a recognition-error correction system that manually corrects mistakes in the recognition result with short delay time. NHK started simultaneous subtitled broadcasting for the news program "News 7" on the evening of March 27, 2000.