End-to-End Speech to Braille Translation in Japanese
Akio Kobayashi, Junji Onishi, Hiromitsu Nishizaki, Norihide Kitaoka · 2022
This study addresses an end-to-end braille translation approach from Japanese speech for the deaf-blind. In Japan, automatic Braille translation from spoken language is expected to improve information accessibility for deaf-blind people. Japanese Braille has a high affinity for automatic speech recognition (ASR) because it primarily comprises hiragana characters (kana) reflecting Japanese phonetic features. Therefore, we attempted to use neural networks to translate Japanese Braille directly from speech in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. We also compared our proposed E2E approach with an existing method that combines the ASR and automatic Braille translation.