Toru Iwasawa

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Toru Iwasawa is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of speech processing and personal robotics, with a particular focus on creating compact, low-power, and cost-effective human-robot interaction systems. His major contributions center on the development of single-chip speech dialogue modules, which integrate speech recognition and dialogue processing onto a single application processor originally designed for mobile phones. This innovation enables personal robots to engage in spoken conversation without the bulk, power demands, or expense of traditional multi-component systems. Iwasawa’s most-cited paper, “A Single-Chip Speech Dialogue Module and Its Evaluation on a Personal Robot, PaPeRo-Mini” (2010, 9 citations), demonstrates the practical application of this technology on NEC’s PaPeRo-Mini platform, evaluating its performance in real-world interaction scenarios. A related 2009 paper (4 citations) further details the module’s architecture and evaluation. While his citation counts are modest, Iwasawa’s work is notable for its engineering pragmatism—pushing speech dialogue capabilities into resource-constrained, consumer-friendly robotic platforms. His achievements highlight a key step toward making conversational robots more accessible, blending embedded systems design with natural language processing to advance the field of personal robotics.