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.'"

Comments

Classic joke..

[sconeu]

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.

Re:Classic joke..

[CRCulver]

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 don't know, but I'm in awe. I once reposted the MyCleanPC troll as a tongue-in-cheek response to a poster who seemed like he was shilling, and it triggered some kind of detection filter in Slashcode, so my account was frozen. I had to contact the admins to get it restored.

Yet somehow BillTheEngineer has posted it not just once, but myriad times. Verily, in days of yore bards would recite this glorious deed of valor down the ages.

Re:Classic joke..

[Khyber]

"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?"

A vulnerability in Slashdot's beta code that I fond and sold for $250. Fuck responsible disclosure, you force this shit upon us, we force some shit right back.

This vulnerability is also present in the last released version of slashcode, so it will work on other sites.

Gotta thank the SoyentNews crew for making that VM. Made my bughunting life so much easier.

Re:Real Time Text to Speech to NSA

[canadiannomad]

Unfortunately this really needs to get modded up... There are huge privacy concerns doing this... Certainly it takes advantage of the removal of Skype end-to-end encryption that we enjoyed so many years ago :(

English to German is relatively easy

[donaldm]

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 :)