ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006

Recent advances of IBM’s handheld speech translation system

Weizhong Zhu, Bowen Zhou, Charles Prosser, Pavel Krbec, Yuqing Gao

Recent Advances in the processing capabilities of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have enabled the implementation of an end-to-end speech translation system on these devices. We have presented a bidirectional speech-to-speech (English and Chinese) translation system, which is hosted on a PDA running embedded Linux. Our Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR) system includes an HMM-based large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer using statistical n-grams, a translation module, and a multi-language speech synthesis system. This paper describes our recent efforts to develop a bi-directional English and colloquial Arabic speech-to-speech system on a device running the popular Windows-CE operating system. We have created completely new translation modules and introduced a fast adaptation scheme for a new speaker or environment. In addition, the componentization of system modules speeds up the development of a new speech-to-speech system.