Skype real time translation lets you chat with people in other languages

[Rafy]

 

Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition. Skype Translator is a great example of why Microsoft invests in basic research. We’ve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they’re emerging as important components in this more personal computing era. You can learn more about the research behind this initiative here.

Coming this year!

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations.aspx

[helping]

So it's going to be like pasting a google translation into ventrilo text to speech?

 

Interested in what "near real time" means because that's not even possible for language. 

Going to be another project Microsoft starts, does half assed, and abandons when it fails. 

[VSG]

Assuming it is using Bing translate, the conversation will end up being a massive headache real soon.

[Misanthrope]

I for one, can't wait for the potential of this. Not because it will be worth a fuck for actual practical usage, but for it's almost limitless comedic potential.

[Sharp_3yE]

I really hope it actually works unlike youtubes caption. Hopefully as long as it's proper version of a language I hope it figures it out well. Even things like siri or cortana don't always get my voice right so I don't expect this to be perfect. Especially with slang.

 

The complete other benefit is how FUNNY it will be when it get it wrong.

[JAKEBAB]

Awesome now I can get one of those hot Swedish girls as my gf lol.

[Silent_Xaxal]

Time to get a Japanese wife.

[Kamil]

It's a good concept and noble goal (though we basically have everything other than the integration into a voice chat service readily available), but I don't think the technology is really ready to be considered a serious product. It's more like a joke, novelty, or emergency communication method; you can usually get most of the point across, but it will mess up enough on details and the occasional bigger issue that it just can't replace a human translator. What's more, that goes for every component of the chain: Speech-to-text is decent but imperfect, text translation is the biggest issue (especially for anything longer than a word in it's basic form), text-to-speech is typically understandable as long as the language doesn't have drastic pronunciation variations that aren't conveyed in the text version, and depending on how the information itself is sent even normal VOIP isn't 100% consistent.

I can't fault the idea, but I doubt this will really be useful for business, politics, or even just personal communication. As I said, novelty may earn it a few uses, and in an emergency (what sort would need automatic translation in semi-real time over internet chat is beyond me) it's better than nothing, but nothing that will change the world.

[SirPaul]

...
 

Have anyone of you tried MIcrosoft Speech recognition API ?

 

yEAAAH ...

Sorry but this really wiil be an project which will fall down and will be forgotten.

 

Like seriously, on great Speech recognition, you need best algorythm for retrieving speech to text.  Then you actually need pretty sick AI module that will translate it with context to another language.

And i guess, that when i will skype with someone from France, it will translate to my native speech (Slovak) really poorly.

Scenario  :

"Is it translating correctly ? " == "Easy it runs late think core act Lee ?"

Of course it will work will multiple dictionaries, and will actually have a very good algorythm .  But i dont really see it to translate from Hungary to Slovak, from Slovak to english.  Or i dont know. 

[Askew]

Does this mean that eventually I'm going to end up on the phone to a customer support operator in India that is no longer attempting to confuse me with their poor grasp of English, but is just speaking Hindi into a computer and I'm now dealing with this damn thing's poor grasp of Hindi and English?

[LeTexan]

Well they are working on it since 2003, so we can assume there will be some acceptable results. But that kind of things need a lot of experience in order to work properly.  Microsoft is taking the first hit as always, let's hope people will remember it when someone copy them, as always.