Blog 0: Starting the Journey!

Hello there! 

My name is Raghav and thank you for following my Senior Project! Right now, you caught me at a time of college interviews and capstone final projects. Before I start my internship and kickstart the 10-week journey, I have a week’s stay in the Galapagos waiting for me! I am incredibly excited to cross the Equator for the first time and rest at the beach.

As a student from an Indian-American household, I’ve connected with my heritage through my mother-tongue and the traditions my parents have passed down. However, “code-switching” or language alternation in sentences is a common pattern within communities with exposure to multiple cultures. I’ve personally seen this change in how my mother-tongue, Telugu, is spoken with family and friends. 

The first step to meaningfully studying language alternation has started with an opportunity to work at the Bolly 92.3 FM radio station with their subchannel Virijallu. Their Bay Area broadcast covers segments in Hindi, English, and Telugu, reaching over fifty thousand global listeners. I realized that listeners who aren’t familiar with multiple languages should have the opportunity to hear broadcasts or receive transcripts of streams in their language of preference.

Thus, I was inspired to create a project using tools for audio interpretation and language translation to interpret audio with multi-lingual dialects into a transcript of any language choice. The introduction of machine learning and open-source artificial intelligence APIs are viable tools for reducing the inconvenience of manually translating raw text directly. Artificial intelligence specifically offers an option for multi-lingual translation with extreme efficiency, although its accuracy struggles to match that of manual translation efforts. 

It is imperative to address this research topic as multilingual translation and speech comprehension spans not just radio stations, but understanding each other’s voices and thoughts. Without a protocol to address struggles in language comprehension, people would be disconnected. 

My AI-integrated protocol will open a larger space for targeted translation efforts as listeners follow a radio broadcast, listening to the dialogue in their language choice of preference. Throughout this process, as an intern at Virijallu, I will access transcripts where hosts alternate speaking between Telugu and English to test my protocol and determine its place in future live-streamed broadcasts. 

Stay tuned for my next blog!