Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
An old joke about a talking pig (which I can't remember - may not have even been a pig) had a punch line along the lines of "ignore the fact that the pig speaks badly, what's amazing is that the pig speaks in the first place"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You're probably thinking of Samuel Johnson as quoted by Boswell:
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?
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.
I would love to try it out. Even if it's only 75% accurate and butchers every 4th word, it can't be any worse
than apple's autocorrect which is infamous. Yeah, you might mistake a meaning here and there but the advantage
of realtime is that the person on the other end can say "no, I ment this". As long as it can correctly translate the
words no and yes then you should still be able to communicate.
You're probably thinking of Samuel Johnson as quoted by Boswell
Yep that would be it.
pig/dog talk/walk whatever .. lol
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!
I would need to see it in person, along with a Spanish speaking person to tell me how well the translation worked out for me to really believe it. I haven't seen a decent system that does speech to text well enough, nor have I seen any systems that did text translation well enough to believe that this product could exist and work well. Text to speech is pretty much a solved problem, but the other two parts of the system, that is, speech to text, and translating text are so far from being good that I can't really believe that we are currently at the point where something like this can be expected to work for day to day conversations. It's hard enough getting human translators to translate things correctly.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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...
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
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.
75% accurate? LOL not a chance in a real conversation.
Compatibility with MS applications has historically been a driver for implementing Wine.
And then Microsoft fanboys keep wondering why Mac, iOS, Linux and Android users hate Microsoft.
Hell, Microsoft isn't even supporting the latest technologies for their own Windows 7 users anymore.
Besides, wouldn't it be easire to just learn Spanish - or English as the case may be - than have to put up with W8?
Path of least resistance folks. No habla "Windows" ocho. Muy Guano de toro.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
with very little use of idioms, technical terms
There are many unsolved problems in machine translation, but neither idioms nor technical terms are among them. For idioms, you just use a lookup table. Even Google Translate gets almost all of them right, and will translate idioms directly into a corresponding idiom in the target language. Technical terms are also easy. Most of them originated in English, and many languages just adopt the English term.
Skype needs to 'value-add' or facebook/google+, via webrtc, will make them redundant.
Tieing it to windows is no surprise given its owner.
I would need to see it in person, along with a Spanish speaking person to tell me how well the translation worked out for me to really believe it.
I agree that I would like to see it in person but you shouldn't need someone on your end telling you how accurate it is.
Honestly, it might work best if the other language was completely muted and if it was completely muted then the only
judge of quality is how well you can communicate with the other person. If you can communicate accurately with someone
who doesn't speak your language then it's successful.
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.
For idioms, you just use a lookup table. Even Google Translate gets almost all of them right
No, it doesn't.
You have clearly never tried the "translate from English to X, then X to English" game with anything more complicated than "the sky is blue".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
And presumably you cannot even read the TFS:
"one classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, "
"Me and my parents correlate, because without them, I wouldn't be here."
"I was meticulous about falling off a cliff."
"Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup."
No, these aren't machine translations, they're human translations. This is what happens when you teach people a foreign language according to associationistic principles (traditional classroom foreign language teaching, AKA "grammar translation"). The learners know what they're saying isn't what a native speaker would say but it's grammatically correct even if it doesn't mean what the speaker wants it to. The main problem is that for language to acquire meaning, it has to be situated, it requires context, purpose, and intent.
Now show me a machine translation system that isn't associationistic, can "read" a situation and understands what the speakers mean to say (pragmatically) rather than what their individual words in combination mean (sematically). When you've done that, you've successfuly created human-like AI, i.e. a machine that can appropriately answer Winograd schemas http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/p... and knows that constructions like, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" are meaningless.
I bet people will have a lot of fun with Microsoft's translator.
Even Google Translate gets almost all of them right, and will translate idioms directly into a corresponding idiom in the target language.
No, actually it gets most of them wrong. I ran a number of Japanese idioms and proverbs and more than 95% of them were hilariously badly translated.
Better yet, try to discern by voice something like "Allá se halla la aya, bajo aquella haya"
In spanish most of those words sounds pretty much alike, and in some cases have several different meanings.
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...
Microsoft's demo with English/German realtime translation was very impressive, with just a single translation oddity toward the end of the demo.
I think this is it, but can't watch the video at work to verify
http://research.microsoft.com/...
Besides, wouldn't it be easire to just learn Spanish - or English as the case may be - than have to put up with W8?
How many years did it take you to learn to speak english? Because that is at least what you will require to learn another language to the same fluency. And that's not accounting for not being embedded in the language or that children are wired to learn language more easily than an adult can.
So it's about $120 for and 8.1 license from Amazon vs a significant amount of time to learn that second language. Your choice.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The current Windows Skype 6.22.x does not handle simple text chat anymore, as it was ruined with the massive bubble-UI copied from smartphones. Perhaps they did some record on wasting pixels for white space, as on a 1920x1200 screen one can view only about ~20 lines of text. Quite likely the next version removes the text chat completely and replaces it with the emoticons for LOL, XDXDX and OMG.
I guess so. If I could effectively communicate with a Spanish speaking person who didn't speak English, then I would be quite impressed. They would hear my English speaking translated into Spanish, and I would hear their Spanish translated into English. I think the other problem is that if neither person speaks the other language, then nobody understands if the machine is saying the right thing. If we are discussing a product design, and I say it must be able to support 250 kg, and the machine translates that as 150 kg, there is no way for me to verify that the machine got it right. Even if the person on the other end repeated what the machine told them, it could conceivably translate the 150 kg they stated back to 250 kg which is what I originally said. Obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but it's just there to illustrate the point. It might work for casual conversation, but when understanding the meaning of the words is crucial, it's not something that I would really rely on.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No habla "Windows" ocho. Muy Guano de toro
And BTW that should be
No hablo "Windows" ocho. Mucho mierde de toro
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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?
That video shows exactly why it doesn't work. I didn't even make it though half the video and found multiple errors in the English text, or what I assume were errors if she doesn't speak like a 3 year old. The guy broke out in laughter at how bad some of stuff comes out. And that's for simple conversation level sentences. If you picked a random person from the audience and got them to translate a random piece of text from a technical document, it would probably be 10 times worse.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So you say "Your mother's red dress looks very nice today"
And it says (in Spanish) "Your mother's red underwear looks very stained today"
Hey, 75% of the words are right.
Well, that's exactly how humans do it.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
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.
Even if the person on the other end repeated what the machine told them, it could conceivably translate the 150 kg they stated back to 250 kg which is what I originally said. Obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but it's just there to illustrate the point.
Here is a fun website that exploits that principle: http://translationparty.com/
Any time you communicate, you have to allow for mistranslation especially when dealing with someone who
has a different native tongue but even when you speak the same language there can be cultural differences
and general misunderstandings. If I say to heat something to 100 degrees, an american will generally assume
fahrenheit while someone from britain will likely assume celsius which could lead to completely different results.
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!)
Besides, wouldn't it be easire to just learn Spanish - or English as the case may be - than have to put up with W8?
How many years did it take you to learn to speak english?
Me flunk english? Tha'ts unpossible!
Because that is at least what you will require to learn another language to the same fluency.
I doubt it, because when I started learning English, my brain was still making a lot of new connections, being a baby and all. But regardless, my present level of fluency in English is not required to get along in other languages.
And that's not accounting for not being embedded in the language or that children are wired to learn language more easily than an adult can.
So it's about $120 for and 8.1 license from Amazon vs a significant amount of time to learn that second language. Your choice.
I made my choice already. I won't use W8 or 8.1. I know enough Spanish and French to get by. If I need to learn another language, I will. No need for Skype to do the translations for me. Years of reading Japanese and Chinese equipment manuals tell me that unless Skype has something brand new never before achieved, it won't do quite as good a job as it is hyped to do, or Skyped to do as it were.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No habla "Windows" ocho. Muy Guano de toro
And BTW that should be
No hablo "Windows" ocho. Mucho mierde de toro
And yet, you knew exactly what I wrote So that you could correct what I wrote. I'm no genius in either French or Spanish, yet I can make myself understood, Just like you did.
Oh, and thanks for the correction.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Oh ... we never talk about that, only the shiny bells & whistles, right?
No privacy, no purchase, sorry.
I know enough Spanish and French to get by. If I need to learn another language, I will. No need for Skype to do the translations for me.
You are comparing Apples to Oranges, by saying you are fluent in english, but just get by in other languages. This Skype system has the potential to enable you to communicate fluently in other languages.
And yes I know what it is like to get by in other languages vs fluency having previously gotten by in Russian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish and suffered various misadventures because of it.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I know enough Spanish and French to get by. If I need to learn another language, I will. No need for Skype to do the translations for me.
You are comparing Apples to Oranges, by saying you are fluent in english, but just get by in other languages. This Skype system has the potential to enable you to communicate fluently in other languages.
I'm not going to hold my breath, because this would be the sort of groundbreaking invention that would merit a Nobel prize. The very equivalent of the Star Trek Universal translator. The likleyhood of it being achieved by Skype is a little far fetched. But we'll see how it pans out. Imagine a world where everyone can sound like Stephen King speaking Spanish.....
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I ran a number of Japanese idioms and proverbs and more than 95% of them were hilariously badly translated.
Maybe the idiom database for Japanese is weak. When I try it for Chinese (which is very rich in idioms) to English, and back, it gets nearly all of them right.
Even if the words are 100% correct, it doesn't mean that the translation makes sense. A while ago another employee decided that instead of sending the text for a screen to our translation team, they would just use google or bing translate. Not long after they did that, a co-worker in México called me laughing hysterically. He said what they had for the machine translated Spanish for "Orders in Queue" actually meant "Commands in the ass".
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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.
Sounds like a reasonably accurate translation to me (but I dont work there).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I can guarantee they'll be able to do that before you post a useful comment.
No it's just genuinely poor in general. I tried idioms even in langauges like Spanish and many were poorly translated. I then tried translating English idioms to other languages and then back to English and they were almost always mangled as well.
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