Traveling can be intimidating if you don’t speak the language in a country, especially when a lot of translation apps seem to butcher everything you’re trying to say. Now, Google is seeking to improve AI translation with its new program, Translatotron . In the company’s announcement, Google describes Translatotron as an end-to-end, speech-to-speech translation model. Essentially, Google is hoping to ditch the usual speech-to-text and then text-to-speech method — which is what Google Translate currently does. Instead, Translatotron will use a neural network allowing the program to skip the step of translating audio to text. What makes the program even cooler is that it’ll retain the voice of the original speaker after translation. In the company’s announcement, Ye Jia and Ron Weiss, Software Engineers, Google AI, wrote: “To the best of our knowledge, Translatotron is the first end-to-end model that can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language. It is...