Speech-to-Speech Translation

Book Overview

This book provides the readers with retrospective and prospective views with detailed explanations of component technologies, speech recognition, language translation and speech synthesis.

Speech-to-Speech Translation System (S2S)

Speech-to-speech translation system (S2S) enables to break language barriers, i.e., communicate each other between any pair of person on the globe, which is one of the extreme dreams of humankind.

Impact on Society

People, society, and economy connected by S2S will demonstrate explosive growth without exception.

Historical Development

In 1986, Japan initiated basic research of S2S, then the idea spread worldwide and was explored deeply by researchers during three decades.

Current Applications

Now, we see S2S application on smartphone/tablet around the world.

Technological Advances

Computational resources such as processors, memories, wireless communication accelerate this computation-intensive systems and accumulation of digital data of speech and language encourage recent approaches based on machine learning.

Development and Readiness

Through field experiments after long research in laboratories, S2S systems are being well-developed and now ready to be utilized in daily life.

Evaluation and Effectiveness

Unique chapter of this book is end-2-end evaluation by comparing system’s performance and human competence. The effectiveness of the system would be understood by the score of this evaluation.

Future Directions

The book will end with one of the next focuses of S2S: technology of simultaneous interpretation for lectures, broadcast news, and so on.