Reviewing the Apple AirPods Pro 3, The New York Times turned to SRI speech technology expert Dimitra Vergyri to unpack the significance of recent advances in translation tech.
With the arrival of the Apple AirPods Pro 3, translation technology is suddenly in the spotlight. According to Apple, the new product “helps users understand another language and communicate with others by speaking naturally with AirPods.” The AirPods Pro 3 is launching with translation capabilities for English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and will continue to onboard new languages, starting with Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified).
Reviewing the Apple AirPods Pro 3 for The New York Times, lead consumer technology writer Brian X. Chen reached out to SRI’s Dimitra Vergyri to contextualize the significance of this new advancement. (As the director of speech technology at SRI, Vergyri is carrying forward the stream of research that created Siri, the SRI-incubated platform that gave Apple an early advantage in speech processing technology.)
Because the AirPods rely on large language models rather than older translation technologies, Vergyri told The New York Times, we can expect the translations to be more accurate compared to past approaches. That’s mostly because words carry meaning based on context, and large language models are more adept at translating words in light of the entire conversation. The mistakes inherent in past technologies, she pointed out, were often a result of piecemeal sentence-by-sentence approaches that couldn’t draw on the larger context.
At the same time, Vergyri cautioned, large language models don’t guarantee a perfect understanding of context. Emotions and cultural nuance, for example, can be extremely complex.
“The gap still exists for real communication,” Vergyri told The New York Times.
To learn more about SRI’s work on speech technology, including recent work applying AI-driven speech analytics to mental health screening, visit SRI’s Speech Technology and Research Lab or contact us.
