Enhancing the Usability and Performance of Nespole! - a Real-World Speech-to-Speech Translation System

International audienceOver the past year, we have developed a fully functional showcase of the NESPOLE! system within the domain of travel and tourism, and have significantly improved system performance and usability based on a series of studies and evaluations wih real users. Our experience has shown that improving translation quality is only one of the several important issues that must be addressed in achieving a practical real-world speech-to-speech translation system. This paper describes how we tackled these issues and evaluates their effect on system performance and usability. We focus on three main issues: (1) a study on the usage and utility of multi-modality in the context of multi-lingual communication; (2) assessing system performance under various network traffic conditions and architectural configurations; and (3) an end-to-end evaluation of the demonstration system