Slashdot Mirror
BBC Launches Machine-Translated Synthetic Voiceovers (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC News service is trialling a tool which provides synthesized journalist voice-overs in different languages, with translation provided by unspecified established online translation services. Although the simulated speech in the BBC video betrays itself with the characteristic staccato flow most associated with Stephen Hawking, the result is above average in terms of natural-sounding speech. However, journalists still need to clean up the returned translations, particularly as the initial test involves Russian and Japanese, and oriental auto-translations can prove embarrassing.
I don't even want to read the summary...
Just put the summary through Google Translate a number of times. English to Japanese and back again, multiple times. What matters isn't the voice, but the translation itself. Okay, a bit off-topic, but still fun to do.
Todos ustedes son vacas. Las vacas dicen moo.
Really?
At least in Japanese the artificial voice is quite good, on the first few seconds its difficult to say if its a person or a machine reading the text, but eventually you begin to notice the uniformity of the tone no matter what the news are. At least for now they are choosing minor news to try it, so its not so much of a problem having the voice-over sounding happy and light while reading about dozens of dead people on a landslide or something.
I wonder if they'll program the machine translators to blindly support the status quo and protect warmongering, child-diddling, corrupt upper-class twits like the BBC's been doing for decades?
You are welcome on my lawn.
No need. For stage 1, it simply translates what it's human overlords say directly. For stage 2, a separate computer overlord tells the human slaves what to say to command this translator and let the humans think they are still overlords of something (less rebellions in that way).
My hovercraft is full of eels...
When BBC launches, y'all better watch out!!!
Since when did we start referring to any reasonably advanced computer algorithms as "robots". I thought a robot, by definition, had to have a body being controlled by the computer. Or is that definition passé now?
This is not the first time I've heard this. Recall "robots will be taking over your programming jobs", as though a C3PO-like droid is going to sit down at a desk and start punching away at a keyboard.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
My first thought was "oriental languages = tonal semantics" and 1960s-era Cybermen (look it up) with their sing-song voices came to mind.
Then I read TFA. The "embarrassment" was in Chinese, which these days at least isn't as tone-dependent as some other Asian languages.
Probably, because those warmongering, child-diddling, corrupt upper-class twits cut the BBC's budget and told them to pray that it would not be cut again.
It's a case of using "good enough" machine translation because the staff that used to do it have left the building.
SFSR can't go 2 minutes without blaming women and minorities for his life being bad. Want a hug, little boy?
I wonder if the japanese language synthetic voice-over service could be hijacked from the BBC website, to fan-dub anime for free?
Sometimes it is difficult to follow fan-subs and it either obscures a part of your screen with the text or the video has to be squeezed vertically to make space for a text scroll letterbox at the bottom.
I'm sure that 100% definitely happened. Maybe try that story with the Gamergate crowd, I've heard they'll believe anything as long as you throw in the word "triggered" and appeal to their manbaby sensibilities.
> BBC News service trialling synthesized journalist voice-overs in japanese
Mitchie M. featuring Hatsune Miku: News at 39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l69v6SVoE9k
I hate that the BBC are so obsessed with voiceovers. Just use subtitles for God's sake, and that way we can actually hear the original language. Some of us prefer that to a voiceover.
Yeah yeah it's prejudiced against blind people... and voiceovers are prejudiced against deaf people.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I prefer David Attenborough doing it.
'Trial' is not a verb, dumbasses.
Pfft... the Rocketmen vs Robots movies did this ages ago... ;)