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LLMs are _very_ good at translating the languages that I speak. They handle slang and colloquialisms very well, and have been surprisingly good at extracting ve

LLMs are _very_ good at translating the languages that I speak. They handle slang and colloquialisms very well, and have been surprisingly good at extracting very context-dependant meaning from the examples that I’ve tested. They’re obviously not perfect, but this is a task that’s impossible to do perfectly. To translate some speech accurately you first have to decipher what the speaker was trying to say, and with most speech coming from human beings, it’s not always clear exactly what it is they’re trying to express, and that’s before you even address trying to translate it.

realusername 3y ago
> you first have to decipher what the speaker was trying to say This is also where the quality is varying a lot between languages. I'm a native French speaker with an heavy non-standard accent and no speech recognition currently works for my normal voice. I also speak Vietnamese to an okay level and while the speech recognition is usually good, the fact that the language is not based on words but syllables usually trips machine attempts at translation and the result is generally pretty bad. These kind of live translations while impressive require the full pipeline to work, speech recognition and then proper translation. If any of them fail, the whole thing fails. On my case, it only works with my English for now then.
- tkgally 3y ago
  > These kind of live translations while impressive require the full pipeline to work, speech recognition and then proper translation. That's a good point. Machine translation of text input by LLMs is pretty good for the languages I speak--English and Japanese--but it can get much worse with spoken input if the speech recognition isn't very good. That said, OpenAI's Whisper is able to transcribe my spoken English nearly perfectly, and GPT-4's translation of that transcription into Japanese is usually very good. The main failures are with proper names.

realusername 3y ago

> you first have to decipher what the speaker was trying to say This is also where the quality is varying a lot between languages. I'm a native French speaker with an heavy non-standard accent and no speech recognition currently works for my normal voice. I also speak Vietnamese to an okay level and while the speech recognition is usually good, the fact that the language is not based on words but syllables usually trips machine attempts at translation and the result is generally pretty bad. These kind of live translations while impressive require the full pipeline to work, speech recognition and then proper translation. If any of them fail, the whole thing fails. On my case, it only works with my English for now then.

tkgally 3y ago
> These kind of live translations while impressive require the full pipeline to work, speech recognition and then proper translation. That's a good point. Machine translation of text input by LLMs is pretty good for the languages I speak--English and Japanese--but it can get much worse with spoken input if the speech recognition isn't very good. That said, OpenAI's Whisper is able to transcribe my spoken English nearly perfectly, and GPT-4's translation of that transcription into Japanese is usually very good. The main failures are with proper names.