Microsoft Research Translating Telephone

What if your computer could transcribe and translate, in near real-time, a phone conversation you're having with someone speaking a language you don't understand? That's the promise of one prototype demonstrated by Microsoft researchers today during a preview of the company's annual TechFest event.

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  Science & Technology

[Vadim Zima]

Machine translation is definitely is improving. As a professional translator, I was very sceptical of it even a few years ago. Now I am impressed with its results more and more often.

[Wanderlei Vieira]

People getting crazy!! lol This is fantastic. I love technology!!!!!!!!!!

Congratulations guys. All of you are the best. cheers.

[cnbd13]

I believe Microsoft would come up with something like this. They already try to outsource everything that they can, now they're just making that easier. About time!!

[waldo000001]

bloody good point - i wonder how MS plans to address these privacy issues. Especially given that this will most likely be mass deployed for enterprises. I hope they have a plan...

[dbrown02]

I work with Korean a lot, and I haven't seen a good translation tool for it yet. People have been saying these translation tools are getting better quickly since I first saw Altavista's Babelfish in the late 90s, but running a Korean website through Google Translate still delivers similarly incomprehensible results. Things probably are getting better, but not nearly as quickly as people continually say.

[Booshibonton]

lol, unlikely that they'll go after everyone smoking weed :P

... at least up here in Canada Land :)

[waldo000001]

it's real. the more interesting question is how much training data went into these particular user's speech models in order to get that kind of performance.

[waldo000001]

Why? You mean because you think machine translation would be more difficult? It's getting better quickly...all you need is data, and data is cheap...