Chen and a team of UW researchers have designed a headphone system that translates several speakers at once, while preserving the direction and qualities of people’s voices. The team built the system, called Spatial Speech Translation, with off-the-shelf noise-cancelling headphones fitted with microphones. The team’s algorithms separate out the different speakers in a space and follow them as they move, translate their speech and play it back with a 2-4 second delay.