Dr. Claudio Fantinuoli

Blog about technology, speech, interpreting and the like

Large Language Models

  • Many people hold a static view of what an AI interpreter is or will be: a tool that translates literally and blindly, no matter how unclear or garbled the original speech is—whether it’s mispronounced, unintelligible, or ambiguous. A mechanical device capable only of direct, word-for-word translations. In other words, a piece of software that will…

  • 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…

  • Most of the time live communication takes place using both verbal and non-verbal means which are adjusted to the situational needs and communicative objectives of the interlocutors. This obviously plays a crucial role also in multilingual communication and in machine interpretation. For example, typical verbal means can be the so-called topicalization, i.e. positioning the most…

  • Today, we’ve made generally available the integration of a Large Language Model (LLM) into KUDO AI Simultaneous Speech Translator. To the best of my knowledge, this marks the first instance of Generative AI being incorporated into a real-life speech translation system. When I began experimenting with LLMs in speech translation, I was immediately struck by…