CMU wearable computers for real-time speech translation

Carnegie Mellon's Wearable Computers Laboratory has built four generations of real time speech translation wearable computers, culminating in the Speech Translator Smart Module. Smart Modules are a family of interoperable modules supporting real time speech recognition, language translation, and speech synthesis. We examine the effect of various design factors on performance with emphasis on modularity and scalability. A system level approach to power/performance optimization is described that improved the metric of (performance/(weight*volume*power)) by over a factor of 300 through the four generations.