Did you miss a session from MetaBeat 2022? Head over to the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions here. Artificial speech translation is a rapidly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Initially created to aid communication among people who speak different languages, this speech-to-speech translation technology (S2ST) has found its way into several domains. For example, global tech conglomerates are now using S2ST for directly translating shared documents and audio conversations in the metaverse.

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station. I'm struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000km apart – and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you're speaking the same language. We haven't reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.