Mobile cloud: DoCoMo shows how it's done

In his first public presentation, new NTT DoCoMo president Kaoru Kato unveiled a new slogan – 'Speed and Challenge'.

Fortunately, his new cloud-based apps are a lot more attention-grabbing.

DoCoMo was probably the earliest advocate of the mobile cloud, seeing it as a natural way to leverage LTE's speed and low latency. And avoid the dreaded dumb pipe.

It's rolling out services in the personal, business and network categories. But as Kato – who was appointed president just two days ago - explains it, the real action is in the network cloud.

“The network cloud enables smart services with the functionality in the cloud,” he said. It takes advantage of high-speed LTE to deliver processing power that would overwhelm even the smartest device.

He showed a demo of a voice translation service that enables speakers of foreign languages to be able to carry out a phone conversation with near real-time translation. Offered in ten languages, that will be launched in Q4.

Kato also showed off a smart voice agent – basically a cloud-based Siri - that lets users drive their phone apps with voice commands, like “what's the weather in Osaka today?” or “send an email  to Hiroshi”, and has a voice-to-text function that can also write the email or text. That was launched on March 1.