Wearable Speech Translation With Semantic Segmentation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing speech translation systems often suffer from high latency and lack the ability to preserve semantic meaning in real-time translations, making them disruptive and less effective in conversational settings.
Innovation Solution
A speech translation system integrated into a wearable device that uses an attention-based mechanism and confidence mechanism to translate speech in semantically cohesive segments, such as phrases or sentences, while preserving meaning and reducing latency through partial and simultaneous translation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If existing speech translation systems process complete sentences before translation, then semantic meaning is preserved, but translation latency increases and disrupts real-time conversation
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments speech into semantically cohesive units using an attention-based mechanism that identifies meaningful phrases and sentences in real-time. This allows translation to occur on appropriately sized units rather than waiting for complete sentences, reducing latency while preserving semantic meaning through confidence scoring for each segment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs partial translation by translating segments as soon as they reach sufficient semantic completeness with a confidence threshold, rather than waiting for complete sentences. This partial action approach reduces translation latency while maintaining reliability through the confidence mechanism that ensures semantic coherence.
2Productivity
If translation output is provided continuously, then real-time comprehension is improved, but ambient audio perception is blocked
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by directing translated speech selectively to the user's ear through a wearable device, allowing the user to perceive translations without blocking ambient audio in the environment. This localized delivery maintains real-time comprehension while preserving awareness of surrounding sounds.
Solution Approach 2:
The wearable device acts as an intermediary between the translation system and the user's ear, delivering translated speech in a localized manner that does not block ambient audio. This intermediary approach allows simultaneous perception of translations and environmental sounds.
Data Source
AI summary
A speech translation system may provide real-time or near real-time translation of speech uttered by a person or emitted from a media device. The speech translation system may include a device that may receive audio representing speech in a source language and output audio representing speech in a target language. The speech translation system may translate the speech in portions representing semantically cohesive speech segments such that the target speech reflects the semantic meaning of words, phrases, and/or clauses as used in the context of the source speech. The speech translation system may condense the speech segments prior to or during translation to reduce verbosity. The speech translation system may selectively translate some speakers and not others, and may determine voice characteristics of source speech and apply identifying characteristics to the target speech that allow a user to differentiate respective target speech from different speakers based on the identifying characteristics.