Amazon has launched Alexa’s new Live Translation feature, which allows individuals speaking in two different languages to converse with each other, with Alexa acting as an interpreter and translating both sides of the conversation.
At launch, the feature will work with six language pairs – English and Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, or Hindi — on Echo devices with locale set to English US.
With this new feature, a customer can ask Alexa to initiate a translation session for a pair of languages. Once the session has commenced, customers can speak phrases or sentences in either language. Alexa will automatically identify which language is being spoken and translate each side of the conversation.
To use Live Translation, issue a voice command like “Alexa, translate Hindi” to get started with translating between English and Hindi. After the beep tone, you can speak in either language. To end a translation session, you say “Alexa, stop.”
Amazon says that the Live Translation feature leverages several existing Amazon systems, including Alexa’s automatic-speech-recognition (ASR) system, Amazon Translate, and Alexa’s text-to-speech system, with the overall architecture and machine learning models designed and optimized for conversational-speech translation.