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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Compte tenu de merde comment est le sous-titrage automatique fermé où vous voyez (TV, Youtube, etc.) en anglais où se fait la plupart des travaux et des recherches originales. Maintenant imaginez vous alors dois traduire cela en une autre langue où l'exercice de traduction est faible ou oui, donc. Maintenant, il s'agit d'ony moitié de l'équation, vous devez ensuite convertir une langue étrangère parlée en texte, puis le traduire en anglais. J'ai des réserves sur les performances d'un tel système, étant donné les performances de toutes les composantes individuelles nécessaires pour que cela devienne une réalité.
That's from Bing Translate. The first few sentences are really hard to comprehend but the last one is, for lack of a better word, perfect.
Multipass.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
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.
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.
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.
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