Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research (U-STAR) consortium. Eiichiro Sumita, NICT.
Ongoing research in institutes all over the world has respectively been taking place for speech recognition, machine translation, and acoustic synthesis. As a further step, we felt the need to connect these speech translation servers around the world via network to realize multilingual speech translations. This was when and why the "U-STAR" consortium, Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research consortium, was established. U-STAR, currently comprised of 30 institutes from 25 countries/regions. U-STAR and its members have collaboratively developed a multilingual speech translation system to provide translation services via a publicly-released client application, 'VoiceTra4U'.