Artificial Intelligence · 2019-05-16

Introducing: Google ‘Translatotron’ (never mind the difficulty in pronunciation) – AI

Google Translatotron

geralt / Pixabay

Ladies, gentlemen & bots, we present to you the Google Translatotron. According to Google, to the best of its knowledge, it`s “the first end-to-end model that can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language.”

And, now the explanation, pardon the jargon: According to the team at Google, in “Direct speech-to-speech translation with a sequence-to-sequence model”, it now has proposed an experimental system that’s based on a single attentive sequence-to-sequence model for direct speech-to-speech translation “without relying on intermediate text representation.”

Which means basically Translatotron by-passes the task of translation into different stages, providing a few advantages over the present-day “cascaded” systems. The plus points, include faster inference speed, avoiding compounding errors between recognition & translation, making it straightforward to retain the voice of the original speaker after translation, & better handling of words that do not need to be translated such as proper nouns.

Much of the explanation provided by the team can be left out here, but suffice to say, according to Google, this is the next best step in digital translations. As proof of the pudding,  the blog post has audio clips that demonstrate the performance of Translatotron when transferring the original speaker’s voice to the translated speech. It is claimed that Google Translatotron gives a more accurate translation than the baseline cascade model, while being able to retain the original speaker’s vocal characteristics. The Translatotron output that retains the original speaker’s voice is trained with less data than the one using the canonical voice, so that they yield slightly different translations.

So, oh, well, more power to Google, right? Here’s to better & faster machine translation of language.

Content Credit: Google

 

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