I ended up reading a whole lot about Machine Learning and AI applications in various fields – gaming, video/photo analysis, face recognition, gaming, especially gaming, agents that game better than humans, etc, but – I chose this option because of its relevance to me and how insanely useful it can be.
We’ve all used Google translate at some point – where we supply an input and the “translator” generates an output. Most common use for me is when I copy past something in Chinese and hit translate, and I get the output in English. Then, there is the voice function – which I sometimes use to check (note, I said *check*) my Chinese oral homework. In there, you press the little mic button, the “translator” listens to your input and when you press the mic button again, it stops listening and generates an output.
Then there’s this –
The translation is in real time. Baidu claims to use Simultaneous Translation and Anticipation and Controllable Latency (STACL) or whatever that means. The result is that the “translator” is capable of staring translation second after a speaker has begun to speak and end translation momentarily after. To some extent, Baidu’s “translator” is able to anticipate the next word based on the current context and what is being said. In an example that I read about here, a translated word resulted in President Bush in Moscow (in English) and the AI was able to predict that the verb upcoming would be “meet” before the verb was even said (since it’s very likely that Bush will be meeting someone if he is in Moscow?).
There is also a latency feature which can be adjusted based on how closely the languages are related, but I don’t completely get how that works. There’s naturally some quality that’s lost, but it’s still able to produce simultaneous translation, which I think is pretty cool, especially when you read about how it works.
I don’t have concrete sources like GitHub repos. I’m just going to link the articles I read. Also, here’s a research paper that I didn’t go through entirely(it looked very complex).