Speechalator: two-way speech-to-speech translation in your hand

Alex Waibel$^{\rm 1,4}$, Ahmed Badran$^{\rm 1}$, Alan W Black$^{\rm 1,2}$$^{\rm 1,2}$, Robert Frederking$^{\rm 1}$, Donna Gates$^{\rm 1}$, Alon Lavie$^{\rm 1}$, Lori Levin$^{\rm 1}$, Kevin Lenzo$^{\rm 2}$, Laura Mayfield Tomokiyo$^{\rm 2}$, Juergen Reichert$^{\rm 4}$, Tanja Schultz$^{\rm 1}$, Dorcas Wallace$^{\rm 1}$, Monika Woszczyna$^{\rm 3}$, Jing Zhang$^{\rm 4}$
$^1$ Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
$^2$ Cepstral, LLC, $^3$ Multimodal Technologies Inc, $^4$ Mobile Technologies Inc.
speechalator@speechinfo.org

Abstract:

This demonstration involves two-way automatic speech-to-speech translation on a consumer off-the-shelf PDA. This work was done as part of the DARPA-funded Babylon project, investigating better speech-to-speech translation systems for communication in the field. The development of the Speechalator software-based translation system required addressing a number of hard issues, including a new language for the team (Egyptian Arabic), close integration on a small device, computational efficiency on a limited platform, and scalable coverage for the domain.