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Microsoft Demos Real-Time Translation Over Skype
Z80xxc! (1111479) writes "Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
I like the bit where it says ""It looks like you're writing a letter..."
I can only imagine the "real time" misunderstandings this new tech will bring! It would be amazing if it did work effectively!
Primera Post!
Back when I was about ten years old (1971) I asked my grandfather, "When you were my age did you imagine computers and men on the moon?"
He replied, "Brian, when I was your age someone told me about radio, with people talking to each other across the ocean without wires. I didn't believe them."
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I want to know if it translates "Out of sight, out of mind" properly.
Also, how the fuck did that fuckhead spammer BillTheEngineer get to post zillions of copies of his spam, all at 16:04, while us regular users have to wait 5 minutes?
I guess it's true, like DRM, the wait period only hurts rules-abiding users.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's impressive but relatively speaking, still easy. Now if they can do English to Japanese and vice versa, that would be taking it to 11.
It had to be said...
The NSA must really love this feature. They can view any encrypted conversation held via skype AND it gets translated automagically for them? Amazing!
If they stop talking to you, perhaps then you know to use different words and avoid a translation issue.
This is just a cover for why Microsoft needs to add Text-to-Speech to the Skype binary. The real purpose is to forward the discussions to the NSA.
I think the use of the phrase "real time" is a bit sensational. To me, that suggests that the translation is being heard on the recipient's end while the speaker is still speaking.
Obviously there has to be some delay in order to account for sentence structure differences between languages, but the fact that the speaker basically has to complete a paragraph and then wait for it to go through makes it seem like their software is "simply" taking the output of dictation software, piping it into Google translate, then piping it into a speech synthesizer, and then making both parties wait for it to finish speaking. It looks like a promising start, and I'm sure it's not a trivial feat.
Star Trek, I suppose, has given me high expecations for how a universal translator will work...
Why can't "cool new thing X" ever be discussed on its own merits, without insanely hyperbolic comparisons to "sci-fi trope Y" that it's entirely different from?
"3D printer - it's a Replicator!"
"VR headset - Holodeck!"
"Shitty voice input - Artificial Intelligence!"
It gets pretty silly.
sic transit gloria mundi
Now if this device could tell me what my wife is saying....
I suggest they fix crashes first (happens regularly to me on iOS, Android and OS X), and just then they start adding features. I can't help it, but before microsoft bought the Skype, I barely seen it crash in years. But now, a longer call hardly goes by without crashing either on my or the other end. As much as I hate sharing my camera and microphone with google, I slowly migrate to hangouts -- not because I like, but because it doesn't crash.
For instance, it would be nice if the lastest version of Skype for Windows didn't sometimes freeze for 45 seconds at a time when merely sending an instant message, with no audio or video call in progress.
A translator for Skype? Bah, that just needs a fixed vocabularly of audio files consisting of "can you hear me now?" and "I cannot see you!" in 50 languages.
Old news - HP has had this same kind of technology for a while. I think its in their MyRoom conferencing product.
"My hovercraft is full of eels"
"Drop your panties, Sir William, I cannot wait 'til lunchtime"
Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Actually English is derived from a West German dialect called Frisian, however over the centuries it has incorporated many other languages including early French and Danish. Still you are right it is relatively easy to translate English to German and vice-versa however it is also very easy to to stuff up the context which can easily be misinterpreted. A good example of this is to go to a web site that is in a different language and see how the page translator handles this.
:)
Japanese or even to Chinese to English translations can be quite strange to the English speaker and that is only translating the written language. As for almost real time translation of the spoken word I hope lazy diplomats don;t even use this technology (at least not yet) otherwise World War III is just around the corner
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Have they fixed the IP issue yet?
The English to German was as bad as any current translation site on the web. Wrong grammar, word placement and tenses all over the place, sometimes obfuscating the meaning.
Can we do it without Kara's inane commentary?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
SpeechTrans Inc a proud Managed Partner of Microsoft who developed SpeechTrans Ultimate a Leading Windows 8 App lets users use their phones to translate conversations in real time as well as chat with Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, and other SpeechTrans users. You can also translate phone calls or even conference calls in real time with their InterprePhone and Intelliconference. SpeechTrans also enables real time translation in the HP MyRoom product which comes pre-loaded on all HP computers for real time callng and translation. To check out speechtrans for free today go to http://speechtrans.com/free-download"
Another example how to degrade intellect, may the whole world speak as 2 year olds. It's magic, sure, Disney is magic too. We don't know how it really works. Cool. Guess it autocoded too then. I'll stick to learning languages with my real brain, real fingers, real skills, real knowledge. Not that magic but way more efficient.
English is widely spoken in Germany (often with better form than Americans). I realize the point of this was to demonstrate the capability more than any particular language, but I'd be much more impressed with tonal languages like Mandarin or Yue Chinese.
It's sad that the open source alternatives are just not progressing, nor popular.
So, skype is known NSA hacked program made by a company that patented video spying.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
As of yet again, MS is using their stronghold and products they buy, that used to work in every platform to leverage Windows. The features will come first to Skype in Windows. And lets say skype has had some real bugs in installing under linux 64 bits for quite a while.
German native here. I think this is just a marketing stunt. The german translation was so bad that it most of the time didnt make sense.
Also the german voice tried to simplify the text as much as possible to give a more or less understandable english version.
Real time translation has a looong way to go. At the moment it is as usable as google translate for chinese web-sites.
While translation API is great, what's really needed is deep tree API; access to syntax, semantic trees. This will be a game changer. How about it Google, Microsoft?
Chère tante, nous allons définir si le double du tueur supprimer tout sélectionner
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I had a device installed in my border patrol booth which could translate a variety of Eastern European languages to English text in realtime as far back as 1982.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
Haha, my fist thought after reading the headline.
For those who don't know, this comes from a Windows Vista speech recognition demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... skip to 0:30
I like the bit where it says ""It looks like you're writing a letter..."
That comment brought a smile to my face, at least.
I wouldn't have commented on it, were it not because it has been marked 'Troll' - this seems to happen whenever somebody makes even the slightest, negative comment about certain things, like in this case Microsoft, or in other cases Apple. That makes me wonder if there is a person or group of persons on /. who is on a mission to censor everything they don't like? Whatever it is, I think it is a petty and unworthy thing to do; speak out openly if you are opposed to what somebody has to say, or else just ignore it.
Background: I'm German.
The German translation is bad (word-to-word translated, not semantically translated), and the German girl is speaking very slow, with English-like grammar and using words closely resembling the English translation she wants to achieve.
So the system is good in English, but not yet in German, and it's staged to look good for English observers.
Instead of spending so much money they could have got the technology for a tenth of the price if they had cooperated with Prof. Waibel, Univeristy of Karlsruhe (now KIT) and CMU.
He had a working system running since now nearly 20 years, it uses Japanese as intermediate language, so everything is translated first into Japanese and from there into the target language.
The first official big demonstration was when Billy Gates visited the KIT and gave a speech. The system translated his speech in realtime from english to german into the other lecture halls.
He was in fact talking about his vision of automatic realtime speech translation, he did not know till the end that his speech was automatic translated!
He was pretty pissed when he found out, perhaps he reason he wanted to proof Microsoft can do the same?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As someone who works in the field of machine translation, I find this to be a nifty feature, but not that all impressive. Its just a text-to-speech, speech recognition combined with the shitty bing translate. Will work for general conversation, but probably completely breaks down on field specific conversations. They could also demo other language pairs, as english and german is the easiest pair to machine translate from one another, and are two of the easiest languages to apply speech recognition and text-to-speech to.
Too bad some dickhead impersonated my username and spammed the fuck out of this article, because I had a great Better off Ted reference.
It's hard to be romantic when the translator makes everyone sound like Phil.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Now we can communicate on skype even if we speak different languages. I wonder how much businesses are going to be happy after this launch.
If they're using the same translation engine as they do for Bing, it is already a failure. If you think Google translate is bad, Bing seems to purposely make the most absurd choices.
I am disappointed by the bad quality of the translation to German, both in therms of grammar and words that have dual meaning. This is somewhat usable but not really something I would enjoy using. Also, the German lady spoke very slowly and overly accurate in pronunciation, probably because otherwise the software would fail. Move on, not much to see here...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I have many meetings with my colleagues in Redmond and I take the opportunity to see her fiance my.
Don't make me laugh. Speech recognition and machine translation together? That's basically the two most hilariously flawed technologies going hand in hand! This cannot possibly turn out well.
SkypeNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
The translation is not as bad as the experience sounds like it must have been. Note that German and English are very similar as languages go.
"Recently ate I a bad batch of Tacos from Taco Bell. Massive gastrointestinal complaints quickly. I tried quickly to the nearest bathroom . After what seemed like an eternity , I finally found what was probably the worst public bathroom in New York. So I sat down , risking a thousand different kinds of messed -butt disease to launch just in time for a nuclear -equipped missiles shit directly in the shell . Unfortunately, the water in the bowl is a deterrent to the overwhelming force of the chair proved to be - his rocket . After the start of the water itself , every part of my body as well as the ceiling and most of the walls we went to the toilet bowl to break, it breaks into two parts. I could only watch in horror as all the other "water" and its contents flooded the room like a tsunami. The few other people in the vicinity gasped for air while running as fast as they could to , so that I have the worst smell from hell and the mother only in security - to endure humper all embarrassments . I do not think I even have a chance to wipe the freshly baked Dingleberries of my back. Based on this experience , I lean against the choice of a different restaurant next time."
Nonaggression works!