My SWBC translation test #1 worked pretty well. Japanese voice to English text via the cloud translation from Microsoft.

Recently, I wrote about my vision for a universal translator so I could understand foreign language shortwave radio broadcasts. Well, my baby steps towards that goal have produced some success. To the point that I think I now have my first proof of concept.

Here is what I did.

I recorded some audio files from my ANAN-7000 DLE receiving stations in the 25 and 19 meter bands one morning. These included Japanese, Korean and Arabic speech. Audio was captured over a virtual audio cable, and recorded as a 20 second WAV file (16 bits) using Audacity.

Next, I opened my browser and went to Microsoft Translate, running as a cloud service on Azure. You can try speech translation in a demo app, either by speaking into your microphone or uploading an audio file. I did this for all three of my foreign language files. Japanese and Korean worked well, but Arabic was confusing as it was a religious speech, maybe?

Above, you can see a simulation of what this would look like if I could connect my shortwave receiver directly to the translation service. But, as for reality, you can watch this video screen capture of my experiment in action.

SWBC Translation Test #1 – Baby Steps

Like I say, baby steps. I am excited that this first experiment worked well. I need to learn more. The trick for me is being able to access these services for free or at low cost. Whether I write a software program to automate real-time translation, or just use an existing app, remains to be seen.

For me, I like the idea of translating speech to text, as shown above, as the preferred option over speech-to-speech. I would rather watch the translation and listen to the original speaker on shortwave.

I hope you will try some experiments of your own and let me know about these. I am sure there are many folks more advanced than me who could provide some help. Cheers for now.