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Ars Reviews Skype Translator
Esra Erimez writes Peter Bright doesn't speak a word of Spanish but with Skype Translator he was able to have a spoken conversation with a Spanish speaker as if he was in an episode of Star Trek. He spoke English. A moment later, an English language transcription would appear, along with a Spanish translation. Then a Spanish voice would read that translation.
now NSA can listen in on any Skype conversation worldwide and have it conveniently translated for them without needing extra staff. pretty sweet!
Once I tried to pick up two Spanish chicks. Would have been useful if I could have know what they were saying about me knowing that I did not know Spanish.
The translation went well, but...
The first thing that Peter heard was "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
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So what did they talk about? Klingons? Or how Giordi always fixes everything with a temporal field reversal?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The translation is only available if you use Windows 8.
There's no technical reason for this. It's a simple business issue. Microsoft wants people to upgrade to Windows 8. Microsoft owns Skype. So it's obvious what happened: Someone called the Skype management and told them that any new features are to be Windows 8 exclusive in future.
I'm really surprised Microsoft haven't ordered the linux client discontinued yet.
It just so happens to have a video chat capability that integrates quite well into the Android ecosystem. It's actually superior in some ways to Skype, but (being part of Google +) nobody has ever heard of it - not even the NSA (?). Microsoft doesn't want to screw Skype up badly enough to force people to discover any of a number of alternatives. RIght now, the only thing maintaining Skype's dominance in video chat is the size of the user base. Force [Linux|Android|iOS|downlevel M$] users to find an alternative and that advantage disappears. Users are so damned fickle that way . . .
I work on Skype Translator. Given the complexity of the technology in the back-end, the team looked for a client code base that was fast to experiment with, develop and release on - and so the modern windows 8 app seems like a good way to go - no other nefarious reason. Also, users of skype translator can call other Skype clients (Skype Desktop is officially supported, while I have certainly called ios, xbox on other clients successfully).
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Come on, everyone knows a few words like "amigo". How can one write for a magazine and be so unlearned?
I noticed that once I cut off the video stream, the meaning of what I was saying changed completely.
(Con apologie per nostri amici Italiani)
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
It worked AWESOME! ...once he worked through several bugs, talked to a Microsoft rep instead of the friend he was originally trying to reach, and learned to adjust to a conversation cadence worse than the old style satellite phones...
Sounds like they have work to do. It's impressive, yes, but it's not nearly the glowing product they just published in that puff piece.
(N/T)
how can you possibly not link to an a/v demo or review of this, in the thread OR in the review???
I went looking on youtube and found a metric crapton of copies of the MS demo. I don't want to watch the publisher's demo, of course it's going to be flawless. (and quite possibly rigged) They've successfully flooded the actual honest review demos into oblivion on youtube. Anyone got a link to a review with A/V test?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is something we've been able to do for ages now in FreeSWITCH. I'm pretty sure that the more complex the speech input, the less accurate the system gets as human language is very difficult to decode as a machine. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't be yelling at those IVR systems that ask us to say X to speak to Nina in corporate accounts payable and we always end up getting transferred to Milton instead...
Puff piece for Skype and lousy summary with no analysis whatsover of very well known translation problems.
Meantime to lighten things up:
Translator joke:
A Mexican bandit robbed a bank. The sheriff and his bilingual deputy captured him, and the sheriff, who couldn't speak Spanish, asked him where he'd hidden the money. "No se nada," said the bandit.
The sheriff put a gun to the bandit's head and said to his deputy: "Tell him, if he doesn't tell us where the money is, I'll blow his brains out."
Upon receiving the translation, the bandit became very animated. "Ya me acuerdo! Tienen que caminar tres cuadradas hasta ese gran arbol. Debajo del arbol, alli esta el dinero."
The sheriff leaned forward. "Yeah? Well..?"
The deputy replied: "He says he wants to die like a man."
work in progress
This speech translator is trés cool.
For a while I've been bugging techies with my conception of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These would be 'ordinary' glasses that would have microphones and nano-technology CPUs inside the frame. The microphones would hear the speech of the person that you are looking at (who is speaking a foreign language), translate that speech into English, and display the text of the translation onto the bottom of the user's frame. Like subtitles in a foreign movie for those of you who have ever seen a subtitled foreign movie. Many Germans haven't. The power to operate these 'subtitle sunglasses' would come from the generators creating electricity from the movement's of the user's head.
I challenge teckies to approximate how long in the future it will be before this kind of product is available for purchase in the $500 range.
One unusually aspect of Moore's Law is that we can project when a product like this will be actually available. We take the cost of making any science fiction concept using today's technology and use future-value calculations of accounting to project a future price time-frame given that the price of the technology will fall by half every 18 months.
Another trick is to use this example as a crude intelligence IQ test. Claim that the Japanese have actually developed 'subtitle sunglasses' but they only translate English into Japanese. Claim that you have been able to obtain a secret advanced prototype of such glasses. Give an ordinary pair of reading glasses to a person and claim that these are actual real 'subtitle sunglasses' that have tiny speakers that create synthetic spoken sound inside the ears. Invite them to try them on. When they put on the glasses, start speaking in Japanese (learn a few phrases well beforehand). The time that it takes them to realize that you are completely bulllshitting them is an indication of how intelligent they are. Hope that they don't get violent.
It's only use is to speak with mexicans? I'm not sure I see the application here.
how can you possibly not link to an a/v demo or review of this, in the thread OR in the review???
So they could sneak in a subtle advertisement for Surface tablets. The reviewer does not seem to have been allowed to take his own photos or video, given that the photo credit is for Microsoft.
Also, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." The article states clearly that this did not work outside of conditions that were carefully controlled by Microsoft. On that note, the writer exclusively covers Microsoft news.
All in all, this should be treated as a press release, not a review.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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His Chin Pouch says it all http://www.google.com/url?url=...
No, really. My hovercraft is full of eels.
I tried almost all of them and each one has one or more deficiencies from ease of connectivity (Jitsi) to lower video/audio quality (oovoo).
It is a pity that after ~ 15 years of Skype the alternatives are still inferior when it comes to basic video conferencing...
Well, I can only judge the quality of the automated translation with regards to the second screenshot in TFA (EnglishGerman) and I have to say that it's just as miserable, and also hardly intelligible, as I had expected. It is even worse than what you would get with Google Translate. Obviously neither of the two involved speak a word of German, otherwise they had never used this for their article.
Example:
Source: "oh ok, nevermind about that call I got it"
My translation: "oh ok, schon gut wegen des Anrufs, habe verstanden"
Skype translation: "über diesen Anruf habe ich es"
Actual meaning of Skype's translation: "over this call I have it"
I suspect that without some proficiency in the source language, you will hardly ever be able to comprehend what the meaning of the translated sentences is.
It is the same problem with all current-gen computer assisted translation that there is so much ambiguity in human language. Another very good example for that can also be seen in that screenshot where "second" was translated as "zweite" which is one possible translation but actually "Sekunde" would be correct.
Until this is resolved, I would not exactly call it technology like from an episode of Star Trek.
CIA agent: We gave you 10m$ to bring us drugs. Where is the 5 tons of cocaine promised? Nowhere! Where did you hide the money? .. and blow out your brains.
Skype: translates
Don Pedro Alejandro de la Vega, drug gang baron, handcuffed: Silence is honour!
CIA agent: Look at my Glock! I'll shove it into your mouth, here we go
Skype: translates
Don Pedro: You scared me to death! I'll say I buried the loot besides the plum tree at my uncle's ranch.
Skype: He's not afraid of death and says he wishes to rest at his grandma's ranch, under the old apple tree.
I was doing that 2 years ago in Germany on my Android phone....
What's it like getting your ass kicked by apk + downmodding to hide it 20x http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... ?
[N/T].
Nobody knows. It's never happened.
Mmell hasn't written a better program than apk that worked for the problem. You fail like always against him, hahahaha. You obviously have no real skills in computing.
What are the "basic things it can't do"? (I'm not disagreeing, I'm just asking what you mean.)
BTW, I would not say that real-time audio translation is a solved problem. It only works for a handful of well-resourced languages in restricted domains, where S2T and MT (and to a lesser extent T2S) work reasonably well.
What are the "basic things it can't do"?
It was never P2P, despite assertions to the contrary (it always used a supernode, but could make the supernode be within one of the call members, back in V 1.0). It also doesn't work over IPv6. If you don't have a V4 stack loaded locally, the application will crash, even if you have V4/V6 NAX/XLAT that would connect you to the V4 server. It's deliberately engineered to break V6, by MS, who is pushing Lync and trying to keep "free Skype" from being the go-to communications platform. They can't monetize it. IPv6 is pretty basic, as is the P2P functionality promised in V1.0.
BTW, I would not say that real-time audio translation is a solved problem. It only works for a handful of well-resourced languages in restricted domains, where S2T and MT (and to a lesser extent T2S) work reasonably well.
So you are asserting that Skype's translator works going between Navajo and Yup'ik? Because I was saying that the "solution" from Skype is no better than what was already solved. Not that everything was solved. Since you are disagreeing, you are implying I'm wrong, which would mean you are supporting the opposite, that Skype's solution is more solved than the list of pieces I named.
Learn to love Alaska
Not sure exactly what you're saying, and in fact I said I was NOT disagreeing.
To be more specific, I'm sure there is no Skype translator (nor any other speech-to-speech translator) between Navajo and Yup'ik, both of which are relatively low density languages (i.e. few computational resources). And no one has (afaik) made even a text-based MT system between either of these languages and English (or some other interlingua), much less between the two of them. (Might be easier between Navajo and Gwich'in, I suppose, both being Athabaskan languages and therefore more structurally similar; but still not done.) Nor are there, afaik, any S2T systems for either of these languages (probably not any T2S systems either). Nor for most of the other 7000 or so languages on this planet.
Well-resourced languages are like English, French, Mandarin, (Modern Standard) Arabic, etc.
Yes. The UN languages. We can translate between them in "real time" today (actually near-real-time, as people misuse "real-time" as being quick enough they don't notice, rather than actually real-time, which is impossible with translations).
... car. In Spanish "...[pause, not real time] El Auto Roja" You must wait for the English statement to end before you can start translating the Spanish version, as the tense, gender, and such (not to mention inflection and other non-literal meaning) must be taken into account.
The red
But in the sense of machne-translated within seconds of being spoken/written, we have solved that for all U?N languages with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. And because the text to speech and speech to text for both is also solved (though not as well, and speech to text the weakest link), Skype solves no "new" problem. They just solve the problem in a popular program.
Learn to love Alaska
Skype used a server-based system to set up calls, going through supernodes if possible (so it was semi-P2P), which handled subscriber lookup functions and also NAT transparency (which was the big thing that Skype did better than standard VOIP protocols such as H.323 and SIP.)
For the actual media path, if it could go directly, it would, but otherwise it would carry the call through supernodes (again, the NAT traversal problem.)
These days it seems to be mostly central servers, partly as a result of Microsoft buying them and partly because there was a lot of corporate pushback against supernodes using your corporation's bandwidth to complete somebody else's call.
Bill Stewart
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