Real-Time Speech Translation Made Simple
Understanding the Challenge
Real-time speech translation combines three complex technologies: speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech. Traditional methods often face issues like errors, loss of speaker identity, and slow processing speeds, making them unsuitable for live interpretations. Current models struggle to balance accuracy and speed due to complicated processes and a lack of high-quality speech data.
Introducing Hibiki
Kyutai has created Hibiki, a powerful translation model with 2.7 billion parameters. It can translate speech in real-time from French to English while keeping the original voice’s characteristics. Hibiki operates at a fast rate of 12.5Hz and is also available in a compact version, Hibiki-M, optimized for smartphones.
How Hibiki Works
Hibiki uses a unique decoder-only architecture that allows it to process speech simultaneously. It employs a neural audio codec, ensuring high-quality audio compression. A special feature called contextual alignment helps manage translation timing, allowing for smooth and coherent translations. Hibiki can handle up to 320 sequences at once, making it suitable for large-scale applications. It has been trained on millions of hours of audio data, enhancing its performance across different speech patterns.
Performance Highlights
Hibiki excels in translation quality and speaker fidelity. It has an ASR-BLEU score of 30.5, outperforming many existing models. Human evaluations rate its naturalness at 3.73 out of 5, nearing the score of professional interpreters. Hibiki also shows better voice transfer compared to other models, maintaining competitive speed.
Conclusion
Hibiki offers a practical solution for real-time speech translation, combining advanced features for improved quality and natural speech. It is available as open-source software, which can significantly enhance multilingual communication.
Explore Hibiki Models
– Hibiki 2B for PyTorch (bf16): kyutai/hibiki-2b-pytorch-bf16
– Hibiki 1B for PyTorch (bf16): kyutai/hibiki-1b-pytorch-bf16
– Hibiki 2B for MLX (bf16): kyutai/hibiki-2b-mlx-bf16
– Hibiki 1B for MLX (bf16): kyutai/hibiki-1b-mlx-bf16
Stay Connected
For more insights, check out our Paper, Models on Hugging Face, GitHub Page, and Colab Notebook. Follow us on Twitter, join our Telegram Channel, and connect with our LinkedIn Group. Join our growing machine learning community on Twitter/X.
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