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Skype Unveils Preview of Live English-To-Spanish Translator
mpicpp writes that Microsoft, after demoing the technology back in May, is giving some real-world exposure to its Skype-based translation. The Skype preview program will kick-off with two spoken languages, Spanish and English, and 40+ instant messaging languages will be available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device. Skype asked two schools to try Skype Translator – Peterson School in Mexico City, and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, USA – playing a game of 'Mystery Skype' in which the children ask questions to determine the location of the other school. One classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, Skype Translator removed this language barrier and enabled them to communicate.
Unless Microsoft can prove some sort of breakthrough in machine translation then the conversation must have been very basic, with very little use of idioms, technical terms, etc., for it to have worked very well.
> using Windows 8.1
I, and my customer, thought it was cool as heck when the open source video conferencing system Big Blue Button added auto-translate back in 2010. It's good to see Microsoft catching on too.
Great, soon Skype on Windows will be supporting 3D video, oculus rift, haptic transmission, telepathy and whatnot all while not handling simple videoconferencing on Linux
The few articles that are found from slashdot and the translation team blog seems to imply this technology wasnt developed in redmond, but in chinese universities by post-doctorates. For example, critical components like phonome learning and the social media training method were all conducted as research. Then, somehow, this magically became a microsoft product.
A major argument can be made that microsofts myopic approach to consumers still exists today. While skype is indeed popular, cobbling the breakthrough translation to an OS no one wants to use is nothing short of the redmond we've come to know and love for the past 20 years. Skype clients exist in linux, mac, and android, but Redmond is needlessly mandating the latest, and least popular version of Windows. lock it in, force it through, then quietly abandon it after 2-4 years when your customers rebel and you've hemmoraged too much cash from X-Box to keep up appearances.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I, and my customer, thought it was cool as heck when the open source video conferencing system Big Blue Button added auto-translate back in 2010. It's good to see Microsoft catching on too.
Except that this is not translation of chat messages, but live translation of spoken word coupled with voice synthesis in the translated language.
You can't tell from the video how "real-time" it is, but it seems fast enough for a basic conversation. Also there is nothing I saw that indicates how much training the speech recognition needs.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Given how shitty is the automatic closed captioning wherever you see it (TV, Youtube, etc) in English where most of the work and original research is done. Now imagine you then have to translate that into another langue where the translation performance is weak or so, so. Now, this is ony half of the equation, you then need to convert an foreign spoken language to text, then translate it back in English. I have reserves about the performance of such a system given the performance of all the individual components needed to make this a reality.
Achille Talon
Hop!
It sort of implies its instant messaging, which wouldn't be too impressive.
It would be great to use Skype again, but alas it ceased working on my 12.04 box.
I was a paying customer (i.e. Skype out) until Microsoft decided that it would no longer support me.
Always good to keep in mind with Skype, courtesy of Edward Snowden, Microsoft, as a partner to the NSA, rewrote it and coded in pre-encryption access for the NSA for all Skype communications (video, audio and text). Microsoft has never said it has taken them out. So always assume that whatever you do on Skype is getting recorded and kept, for future use, by the NSA or one of the other five eyes agencies.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
As others have pointed out, last week the U.S. passed a law (and the President signed it), which got no press, authorizing all U.S. citizen communications can be recorded without a warrant and that information can be passed from the NSA (which was created only to spy on external threats...not anymore), kept for as long as the NSA would want and passed directly to law enforcement agencies when they want it. Its not that President Obama won't do anything with your skype communications, its what the future Nixon, McCarthy or (FBI) Hoover, or worse, will do with them.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
All these new skype features, yet they still lack basic spell checking.
Someone needs to drag their project manager out back and beat him with his Macbook.
?Donde esta su escuela?
Slasdot is not your secretary. You could either watch the video or spend 20 seconds with your favorite search engine to find your answer yourself.
nothing I saw that indicates how much training the speech recognition needs.
Translators as a whole will never have enough training, since it's an art not perfected even by humans. When an idiom's literal translation is nonsense, the translator's job is about imperfect trade-offs.
If you're from Canada you'll understand when I say
Let's see it handle Newfaneese!!!!
examples here
“Who knit ya?”
Translation: Who’s your mother/parents?
This one doesn’t need too much explanation, but try telling your mother that all she was doing for nine months was “knitting.”
“I’m gutfounded. Fire up a scoff.”
translation "I'm hungry, make some food" Translation: I’m hungry. Make me some food.
Well watching the video I got, the cold childs that the marketers have overly exaggerated its abilities.
The source of amazement on the kids faces wanted to make me gag, I think they recorded them watching a magician doing his tricks, then replaced it with the clips of the kid talking on Skype.
So we have technologies Like Siri, Skyvi, or Cortana a cloud based system to interpret your speech and convert it to text, and get some context out of the sentences. So after that point you are now translating a chat message. So you can do what google translate does and translates the text to an other text.
Then we take the speech synthesizers which we had for decades to speak the text back.
So I expect the lag will be like the lag we get on Cortana wait for the sentence to complete and parse the data and get a response.
Now I am not dissing on microsoft it is a good feature to have in skype. But the video made me sick to my stomach. Kids may have had that reaction if this technology was released in the 1990's. Because right now this is only an incremental logical next step feature... Not a breakthrough.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What will M$ come up with next? Maybe someday they'll make an operating system or something really useful.
And presumably you cannot even read the TFS:
"one classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, "
This is just current enterprise tech finally making its way into the consumer world.
I've done a lot of work developing technology for language schools, requiring the recognition & reproduction of speech. This is nothing new, it's just speech recognition algorithms being parsed through a translator & then spat back out by a text-to-speech engine. Heck, I even have something like this running on my home Media Centre.
The groundwork has been done by universities & is being improved by both public (the CIA comes to mind) & private sectors. Unsurprisingly, it's big business in the teleconferencing market.
It's not perfect, however it's very different to the challenges presented to the likes of YouTube. A telephone conversation doesn't have problems with background noise & the people using this technology are aware they need to speak more slowly & clearly - a benefit not afforded to movies & cat videos.
The Japanese telecoms company NTT Docomo has been offering this technology to its customers since 2012!
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
What a jaded asshole. Has it occurred to you that maybe KIDS don't know how those technologies work, or that this is an 'incremental logical next step'? Nah, didn't think so.
What a jaded asshole.
You actually understood what he said? I thought his automatic translator had taken a wrong turn when avoiding the hovercraft full of eels.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Do you have children? At that age they are still easy to fascinate. Put them in contact with a stranger that doesn't speak their language, involved them in a mystery game and you'll see how easily fascinated they are. Not everybody lifts their chin at innovation (even if you think it's already been done).
I don't mean to defend Microsoft but what product offers this at no cost and provides live translation?
Maybe I'm just ill informed but I haven't seen any mainstream products offer this.
Here's a bunch of Android apps that do. Some are text and voice, some are text-only.
https://www.google.com/search?...
My original subject line and message mentioned Big Blue Button, an open source web-based video chat application. It did translation for free, using Google's API. Google now charges $10 per half-million words (or is it half-million characters? ). Technically not free, but awfully close - half a million words is a LOT of chat messages.
It doesn't matter how many new features they add if their account recovery is so broken that the owners can't get control of their own account. Most people don't want to make a replacement account as a solution.
I mean, you really expect someone to remember what year you made a skype account? And (not or) the first five contacts on your contact list?
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Oh ... we never talk about that, only the shiny bells & whistles, right?
No privacy, no purchase, sorry.
FTA:
The preview program... will be available to Skype customers who... are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device.
That's a showstopper for me right there.
Spain is the European country which has a lower proficiency rate in foreign languages, specially English.
Now they have a perfect excuse for being even lazier...
Worse, given the general low literacy of the Spaniards they may even become convinced that the rest of the world actually speaks Spanish... not that they aren't doing it yet.
BTW: Please, MS, Google, etc... improve your Dutch / English translators, they utterly sucks in both ways, and these are closely related languages.
-- 29A the number of the Beast