Four years ago today, my personal journey in the practical implementation of Machine Interpreting started with a simple application -written in a rainy weekend just for fun- which is still available online for free at www.machine-interpreting.com. Try it out if you are curious!
Now, commercial speech translation systems are completely different from that first naive approach. At KUDO, for example, we innovated the space with LLM for context-aware translation, dynamic voices, and other advanced features. And the list of ongoing research and improvements in our R&D pipeline is still long. A fascinating journey shared by a huge community of scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs that will contribute to break down the language barriers for everyone.
Don’t be fooled: all the recent advancements in AI that are powering machine speech translation are certainly not limited to full automation. They also power tools to support professional interpreters, the real heroes of multilingualism, like my first-ever project, the computer-assisted interpreting tool InterpretBank.
Much more innovation will come from brilliant minds around the world. Before looking to the future, it is sometimes nice to look back at a personal level and see where everything began.