Multilingual speech-to-speech translation system for mobile consumer devices

Abstract

Along with the advancement of speech recognition technology and machine translation technology in addition to the fast distribution of mobile devices, speech-to-speech translation technology no longer remains as a subject of research as it has become popularized throughout many users. In order to develop a speech-to-speech translation system that can be widely used by many users, however, the system needs to reflect various characteristics of utterances by the users who are actually to use the speech-to-speech translation system other than improving the basic functions under the experimental environment. This study has established a massive language and speech database closest to the environment where speech-to- speech translation device actually is being used after mobilizing plenty of people based on the survey on users' demands. Through this study, it was made possible to secure excellent basic performance under the environment similar to speech-to-speech translation environment, rather than just under the experimental environment. Moreover, with the speech-to-speech translation UI, a user-friendly UI has been designed; and at the same time, errors were reduced during the process of translation as many measures to enhance user satisfaction were employed. After implementing the actual services, the massive database collected through the service was additionally applied to the system following a filtering process in order to procure the best-possible robustness toward both the details and the environment of the users' utterances. By applying these measures, this study is to unveil the procedures where multi-language speech-to-speech translation system has been successfully developed for mobile devices.