In plain words: A single network turns Spanish speech straight into English speech, skipping the usual step of writing the translation down as text first. It worked, though it scored slightly worse than the standard two-step speech-to-text-then-text-to-speech pipeline.
Abstract
We present an attention-based sequence-to-sequence neural network which can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language, without relying on an intermediate text representation. The network is trained end-to-end, learning to map speech spectrograms into target spectrograms in another language, corresponding to the translated content (in a different canonical voice). We further demonstrate the ability to synthesize translated speech using the voice of the source speaker. We conduct experiments on two Spanish-to-English speech translation datasets, and find that the proposed model slightly underperforms a baseline cascade of a direct speech-to-text translation model and a text-to-speech synthesis model, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach on this very challenging task.
Ye Jia, Ron J. Weiss, Fadi Biadsy, Wolfgang Macherey, Melvin Johnson, Zhifeng Chen, Yonghui Wu
arXiv:1904.06037 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS · submitted Apr 12, 2019 · updated Jun 25, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to Interspeech 2019