Language and Voice translation has been a latest advent in Modern Technology whether it has been Computers or Smartphones.Use of Natural Language Processing has revolutionized the field of Language translation .Language Translation and Voice Translation is a feature of various products and applications like Google Assistant,Alexa etc.
As you must be knowing Human voice is a identifying trait of one’s Personality and relevance to one’s Speech.Also in recent times Voice Translation has proved to be a major tool for connecting people of different lingua.
With the continuous efforts of the Researchers and Developers at Google,they have developed an Audio Translator that minimizes the change in Human voice ,Tone ,Amplitude and other Characteristics after Translation.Just check it for yourself!
This a voice clip in Spanish Language-
This is how the clip will sound like in Traditional Automated Translation System-
This is how it will sound in Google’s new Automated Translation System-
The results are not convincing in the beginning ,however the project is still in development stage and major improvements are expected.The translator was able to retain major characteristics of the voice because it converts audio input directly to audio output without any intermediary steps.The traditional translators convert audio in text in intermediary steps which led to the loss of characteristic of original voice.
The new Translator is dubbed as Translatotron -an end to end speech to speech translation system.The Translatotron comprises of three major steps-
- Audio spectrograms from input languages into output ones which are trained to map into each other.
- A Conversion of spectrograms into an audio wave.
- The third component layers the original speaker’s voice back onto the final output.
In all the three steps,translator looks at speaker’s audio spectrogram- a visual snapshot of frequencies used when the sound is playing which is called as Voiceprint.
There are high expectations and prospects form this project owing to it’s realism and innovation.A major advantage in this project is that there are minimal steps in the translation process so chances of occurrence of errors are comparatively lower.It is still in development phase and developers have tested only in Spanish to English Translation .But initial tests hint huge prospects and commercial value in the Translatotron.
