The language barrier remains a significant impediment to seamless global communication, a challenge particularly pronounced within multilingual communities and institutions such es EU or UN. Recent advancements in AI have led to the increasing availability and use of automatic speech translation tools. However, current tools still seem to fall short of fully supporting people to overcome language barriers in everyday life, showing a gap between improvements as measured by computer scientists and as perceived by end users.  

Together with Alex Waibel, Jan Niehues, and Maike Züfle (IAR), Alexander Maedche (WIN, human-centered systems lab) from KIT participated in the Dagstuhl seminar taking place in time frame of June 14th-17th 2026 tackling this important challenge. The seminar brought together researchers and practitioners from the fields of speech translation, interpretation, and human-computer interaction to foster an interdisciplinary community and redefine together how AI-mediated multilingual communication is studied, designed, and practiced in the future.  

Further information about the seminar is available here: https://www.dagstuhl.de/seminars/seminar-calendar/seminar-details/26252