How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available. I suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the actual speech to text and back?

So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo

I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?) or directly speech-speech?

Edit: This list seems useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...