Cambridge IELTS 19 Academic Reading Test 3 (Questions 27-30) (Online Test)

Is the era of artificial speech translation upon us?

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognize speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear in my office surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station in Japan. I’m struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000 kilometers apart-and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you’re speaking the same language, as we are. We haven’t reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak more comfortably in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.

At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he is a professor of computer science, Waibel and his colleagues already give lectures in German that their students can follow in English via an electronic translator. The system generates text that students can read on their laptops or phones, so the process is somewhat similar to subtitling. It helps that lecturers speak clearly, don’t have to compete with background chatter, and say much the same thing each year.

The idea of artificial speech translation has been around for a long time. Douglas Adams’ science fiction novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, published in 1979, featured a life form called the ‘Babel fish’ which, when placed in the ear, enabled a listener to understand any language in the universe. It came to represent one of those devices that technology enthusiasts dream of long before they become practically realizable, like TVs flat enough to hang on walls: objects that we once could only dream of having but that are now commonplace. Now devices that look like prototype Babel fish have started to appear, riding a wave of advances in artificial translation and voice recognition.

At this stage, however, they seem to be regarded as eye-catching novelties rather than steps towards what Waibel calls ‘making a language-transparent society.’ They tend to be domestic devices or applications suitable for hotel check-ins, for example, providing a practical alternative to speaking traveler’s English. The efficiency of the translator is less important than the social function. However, ‘Professionals are less inclined to be patient in a conversation,’ founder and CEO at Waverly Labs, Andrew Ochoa, observes. To redress this, Waverly is now preparing a new model for professional applications, which entails performance improvements in speech recognition, translation accuracy and the time it takes to deliver the translated speech.

For a conversation, both speakers need to have devices called Pilots (translator earpieces) in their ears. ‘We find that there’s a barrier with sharing one of the earphones with a stranger,’ says Ochoa. That can’t have been totally unexpected. The problem would be solved if earpiece translators became sufficiently prevalent that strangers would be likely to already have their own in their ears. Whether that happens, and how quickly, will probably depend not so much on the earpieces themselves, but on the prevalence of voice-controlled devices and artificial translation in general.