Amazon just announced that its virtual assistant, Alexa, now supports Live Translation, allowing users of different languages to communicate with each other. In this complex process, the virtual assistant will translate both sides of such a conversation.
Alexa can currently translate English, Spanish, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi using the Live Translation feature. Amazon said this feature is supported on Echo devices with location set to US English
The online translation feature leverages existing Amazon systems and features, including Alexa's Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and its text-to-speech systems. Amazon said in a recent statement that they, when combined with Amazon Translate, and Amazon's full range of machine learning models designed and optimized for spoken language translation, can be easily combined with Live Translation.
Linking to this translation function opens up new horizons in real-time communication, providing exciting opportunities with the seemingly breaking down of the communication barrier.
Similar to what happens with most ASR systems, Amazon stated that the live translation system includes both an acoustic model and a language model, both models are combined to give the ASR system an idea of choosing between alternative interpretations of the same phoneme sequence.
To provide users with an almost natural experience, Amazon has adapted Alexa for colloquial speech by modifying its destination index to accommodate longer pauses for Live Translation. Alexa uses an end marker to determine when a person has finished speaking. Alexa can also easily detect pauses in the middle and end of a sentence.
Search engine giant Google also offers a similar feature called translator mode. It remains to be seen how the two services fit side-by-side, but it certainly provides an additional opportunity for live translation and cross-language communication.
