Using an AI to Decipher a Japanese Phone
This should work in all major languages with most consumer devices.
A few days ago, I bought a boring new phone. I bought the latest model of my old phone, which was being discontinued and was starting to malfunction. My new phone is boring because it is just a different color. But that is ok because it has one important feature my old phone lacked.
It works.
My functional, yet boring phone has various menus and buttons. And since this is a Japanese phone with no way to change the display language, it is cumbersome to set up for a person who is not fluent in reading Japanese.
To figure out how to change the default display on my phone, I did a Google search, and the AI Overview that popped up provided a tantalizing series of easy steps that would change the display of my phone—which didn’t work.
So, since I am a subscriber, I decided to try Claude, the AI developed by Anthropic.
Claude is powerful and multilingual. It can listen to an international discussion and understand what everyone is saying, even when the participants themselves have no idea what anyone else is saying.
At first, Claude didn’t recognize the name of my F-41F phone. But when I told Claude my phone is an NTT Docomo phone, it was able to search for Japanese documents, find the appropriate ones, and locate the specific menu items I needed to set up my phone.
Here is a screenshot:
Not only did Claude show me the Japanese menus (so I could make sure I was in the right place), but it also provided the item I needed to select (in square brackets).
I am sharing this because using Claude saved me a lot of time.
Remember this the next time you think you need to consult a manual.
You probably don’t.