In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a user interface for SPICE, a web-based toolkit for rapid prototyping of speech and language processing components. We report on the challenges and experiences gathered from testing these tools in an advanced graduate hands-on course, in which we created speech recognition, speech synthesis, and smalldomain translation components for 10 different languages within only 6 weeks.

In this paper we investigate the rapid deployment of a twoway Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation system. We discuss the approaches and amount of work involved to port a system to a new language pair, i.e. the steps required to rapidly adapt ASR, MT and TTS component to Afrikaans under limited time and data constraints. The resulting system represents the first prototype built for Afrikaans to English speech translation. 1.

Although we have far from solved the issues in porting speech translation systems to new languages, we have gathered sufficient experience by now to identify a number of major challenges in the process. Although well-defined processes exist for building speech recognition, speech synthesis and statistical machine translation models, they still require both significant native speaker involvement and linguistic expertise. As the core technology improves we believe we will see increasing cultural and social issues in contributions from native speakers. This paper identifies some of these issues and presents our initial attempts to build tools that we hope will eventually allow linguistically naive native informants build complete speech translation systems. 1.

In this paper we investigate the rapid deployment of a twoway Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation system. We discuss the approaches and amount of work involved to port a system to a new language pair, i.e. the steps required to rapidly adapt ASR, MT and TTS component to AFrikaans under limited time and data constraints. The resulting system represent the first fully functional prototype built for Afrikaans to English speech translation.

Cepstral has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to develop voices for a number of languages of emerging prominence. These include low-density languages, or languages that are not spoken by a large number of people. These languages are sometimes known as minority, underrepresented, or lesser-used languages. Other languages of emerging prominence include