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Abstract - Ouvia: A User-centered Framework for Measuring Usability of Speech Translation in Real-World Communication Scenarios
Speech translation (ST) is increasingly adopted in user applications, yet its evaluation largely focuses on decontextualized testbeds and holistic quality, rather than end users' communication needs. We introduce Ouvia, an evaluation framework for measuring user-perceived usability of speech translation outputs in real-world settings. Ouvia focuses on one-to-one communication: an English speaker needs to convey a request to a Portuguese speaker, and the message is automatically translated. Through a custom web app and multi-phase study design, we collect more than 1,750 such interactions in healthcare and everyday situations, mediated by four ST systems, involving speakers from three English dialects and two genders. We find that modern ST serves people only to a limited extent -- only around half of interactions are rated as usable -- with significant gaps in reported usability across demographic groups. Moreover, among quality metrics, we find that QA-based evaluation is a substantially stronger predictor of real-world usability than standard approaches. Together, these findings stress the importance of situated, user-centered evaluation frameworks that go beyond holistic quality scores and attend to who the technology serves -- and how well.
Ouvia:面向真实世界交流场景的语音翻译可用性用户中心评估框架 /
Ouvia: A User-centered Framework for Measuring Usability of Speech Translation in Real-World Communication Scenarios
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出了Ouvia框架,通过模拟英语与葡萄牙语使用者之间在医疗和日常场景中的真实对话,发现当前主流语音翻译系统的实际可用性仅约50%,且对不同性别和口音的用户效果差异显著,因此强调评估不应只依赖整体质量得分,而需关注用户实际使用体验和人群差异。