VIP II seeks to continue and extend the pioneering work carried out on VIP, which is the acronym of the previously funded project a href='https://www.lexytrad.es/VIP/' target='_blank'>Voice-text integrated system for InterPreters. The VIP system or VIP1 represents a new-generation of interpreting- related technologies that is based in interdisciplinary cutting-edge research. VIP1 has filled several major research gaps that were identified at the time of its submission, and also during the project timeframe. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first open- source purpose-built integrated system designed to fulfil interpreters’ needs and requirement, that is intended to provide support to both interpreters and trainees.

VIP II intends to improve the system further. While internal and external evaluations of the tool have shown very good results in general, the findings also point out to the existence of areas in need of further research (e.g., ASR, multimodal corpora), functionalities that should be improved (e.g., note-taking, machine translation), new desired features, more languages, new integrations and improved functionalities, etc. Besides, it is also necessary to adapt to new interpretation scenarios in terms of technology uptake, real needs, and degree of automation in a rapidly changing world.

Consequently, the VIP II Project has the following research aims: (i) improve VIP1 to better accommodate the needs and requirements of interpreters (professional and trainees); and (ii) establish the feasibility and impact of achieving automation in real interpreting scenarios.