back to article Microsoft whips out real-time translator for Skype calls

Microsoft has rolled out a public preview of Skype Translator, its long-ballyhooed service that provides Star Trek–style real-time translation for voice calls and online chats. "We've invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they're emerging as …

  1. stuartnz
    Mushroom

    Bloody warmongers

    So, the Babel fish reference means that it's actually MICROSOFT who "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."? Actually, that sounds about right.

    1. poopypants

      My hovercraft is full of eels

      This will be very useful for tourists.

      Tourist: "Where is the nearest toilet?"

      Local: "I'm sorry you just missed it, but there should be another one along shortly."

  2. MrDamage Silver badge

    English and Spanish only

    Do they also include the scouser and homie dialects?

    1. Lusty

      Re: English and Spanish only

      I'd imagine it's learned on everyone with an Xbox or Windows phone, so probably yes. I suspect, however, this is yet another example of Microsoft creating something to support its 100,000 users in online meetings and reduce internal costs and someone said "hey, the public might like this too" so they're releasing it. Most of their server software seems to fit this category

  3. Adam 1

    this could make Skype interesting

    They just need to enable multi hop translations. I want my conversations to sound like DVD player instruction English. Much more fun than the current can you still hear me; yes but I only see the top of your head conversations that are par for the course.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: this could make Skype interesting

      For number one best look-hearing of film? Necessarily, it is the best - however also to be insert Disk of Video not always the follow:

      1. Pressing of the button will action tray remove.

      A) Tray of video disk is assert! This is certain.

      III: Pressing again tray become one.

      Viewing enjoy!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Joke

        Re: this could make Skype interesting

        So you're the bastard who writes the Engrish destruction manuals i have to read with my latest chinese clone of whatever.

        I hope your balls fester...

        Or your tits, no sexism here...

        NB, of course, as any fule no, real men don't read instrruction manuals...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    German

    I wonder how they'll be able to do "real time" translation of German, given how the sentences pile up all the verbs at the end like cars on the bottom of an icy hill? But I suppose halting conversation is better than no conversation.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: German

      I have seen their "German" Demo from a couple of weeks ago. The German person spoke extremely clearly and they used pre-rehearsed non idiomatic sentences. Even then it didn't work very well. The English speakers, who spoke normally, were translated into complete gibberish.

      In short this system doesn't seem to be better than what IBM showed in the 1990s.

      1. StephenH

        Re: German

        I had a University lecturer from Pakistan who learnt English in Germany. I suspect this will be similar

    2. Charles 9

      Re: German

      What I'm curious about is how well the system handles homophonic phrases. For example, are you telling someone to "Regognize speech" or "Wreck a nice beach"?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: German

        Homophonic!? We want none if that right wing sexual prejudice here, I thank you very much.

    3. JDX Gold badge

      Re: German

      How do human translators do it? If you fundamentally can't translate the sentence/clause until the last words resolve it, that's what algorithms will have to do too.

      1. Graham Marsden
        Happy

        @JDX - Re: German

        There was an anecdote I heard many years ago about an international conference and a German man was speaking whilst English people were listening to a translator.

        At one point he had been speaking for quite a while but the translator had fallen silent and the English speakers were tapping the earpieces and looking around at the translation booths wondering what was happening when there was an anguished mutter of "The verb, man. The VERB!!!"

    4. MacroRodent
      Boffin

      Re: German

      It obviously has to wait for the ends of sentences, and not just for German. As anyone who has done translation the old fashioned way knows, words usually cannot be translated properly without knowing the context, and the word order often has to be rearranged for the result to sound natural in the target language.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: German

        The trouble with homophonic phrases is that, sometimes, not even context works for you because both phrases make contextual sense. At this point, translation becomes less a science and more an art because it almost requires knowing the "feel" of a phrase to distinguish which is which, and even then it can be hit or miss. And the more esoteric you need to go to figure it out, the harder it becomes to train a machine to repeat the feat.

    5. Crazy Operations Guy

      Re: German

      The verb coming at the end of a sentence is common in English as well. And the verb isn't always at the end of the sentence in German either (such as in the phrase "Ich bin Ein Berliner" and similar constructs)

      There are no commonly spoken languages that enforce a strict word order. In language, relaying the message is the whole point rather than following an endless list of rules and exceptions.

  5. arctic_haze
    Black Helicopters

    Scary stuff

    If Microsoft is able to translate Skype conversations in real time, making transcripts is a piece of cake comparing to that. And that's rather useful for snooping agencies of all kind, isn't it?

    However, considering the proverbial Microsoft software quality, what will the government read when you say "She was afraid she would bomb out of school"?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Scary stuff

      If Microsoft is able to translate Skype conversations in real time, making transcripts is a piece of cake comparing to that. And that's rather useful for snooping agencies of all kind, isn't it?

      Yup - this is an almost *perfect* excuse to spool a conversation through a service that can make a realtime transcript of it. All hail the keywords list.

      However, considering the proverbial Microsoft software quality, what will the government read when you say "She was afraid she would bomb out of school"?

      Don't forget that MS has never developed something ITSELF that was worthwhile. It is likely that they will simply get offered the facilities that have since long existed in ECHELON.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How about getting written text translation right first?

    When Bing (or the others) can translate something as basic as a newspaper website intelligibly, then maybe that would be the time to tackle the garbled mess that is normal human speech. Experience suggests that we're still quite some way from that point, particularly for languages that have quite different sentence structure and conjugation (English/Finnish for example).

    1. Suricou Raven

      Re: How about getting written text translation right first?

      Google translate seems to have improved - most things I put in do come out intelligable, though they'd still score an F on any english exam paper. That's without having to handle the error from speech recognition too.

      1. T. F. M. Reader

        Re: How about getting written text translation right first?

        Google translate seems to have improved

        This may be true, but you still need to be reasonably fluent in both languages to be reasonably sure that the translation conveys the intent correctly and is not too embarrassing. All too often the translation contains words corresponding to the original but means something completely different.

      2. stuartnz

        Re: How about getting written text translation right first?

        IMO that very much depends on the language. I find Google Translate not bad for most Eurpoean languages, and it's Hindi isn't awful, but try it on Korean and the limits of machine translation are made painfully obvious - the results come out sounding like something the dawrf from Twin Peaks would say when he was trippier than usual.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: How about getting written text translation right first?

          We also have to recognize that textual translation and speech translation are two entirely different beasts. With text translation, positioning and emphasizing formats need to be understood.. Whereas with speech, inflections and other auditory cues (ex. pauses) need to be understood. IOW, what you learn in textual translation probably wouldn't translate well to speech translation and vice versa.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            How you know text translation is working well (IMHO)

            Translate the same page of text back and forth between the same two languages - does it keep getting harder and harder to understand, or is pretty stable after the first round trip?

            In my experience, anything longer than a sentence fragment becomes laughable after a few round trips, whether using Bing, Google or any other online translation service. It is OK for getting the overall gist of what is being said (modulo a few errors that stand out as obvious, and undoubtedly a few that fly under my radar) if you want to read a news article in French or Chinese, but the result is to a professional translation as a Yugo is to a Maserati.

    2. Crazy Operations Guy

      Re: How about getting written text translation right first?

      Translation is one of those things you have to fail at for quite a while before you get it right; you need extremely large sets of data in order to do it right. Of course machine-based translation will always suck compared to trained humans no matter how much computing power and data you throw at it.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "as many languages as possible."

    presumably the language combinations used by those funny bearded men (and women?) who like to blow up themselves in public places - those have been long outsourced to the known agencies, yes?

  8. T. F. M. Reader

    I am very unlikely to have a real-time Skype conversation completely without a common language with the other party. I would also expect that when one person speaks his/her native tongue with a foreigner who is less than fluent s?he can relatively easily make a reasonable effort to speak clearly and without too much slang. Therefore, I would assume a more pressing problem to solve is to make non-native speech and accents more comprehensible. Why not start there?

  9. Graham Marsden
    Coat

    But...

    ... will it also make your mouth automatically lip-synch to the words that are being translated like happens on Star Trek?

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: But...

      Probably. Didn't someone already invent something that would make your eyes appear to be looking at the camera rather than always looking down at the screen?

      1. Charles 9

        Re: But...

        I believe that was made for laptops with built-in cameras that provide a fixed reference point. I'm also not sure it was ever actually released to the public.

  10. Primus Secundus Tertius

    TV subtitles

    People have complained, rightly, about the poor quality of machine generated TV subtitles. It would be useful to test the speech decoding of this MSFT system with those subtitles.

    Even better if they could get it to take useful minutes of meetings comprising: subject discussed, principal arguments for and against, decisions taken, actions placed.

  11. Sporkinum

    Already have it..

    The prepaid phone company I use has been doing this at least since last summer when I signed up for their service. I have no idea how well it works, but they charge 35 cents a minute additional to use it.

    Access to Real-Time InCall Translation

    Have you ever talked with someone from another country and worry about how effectively you are getting your point across? Don’t have time to study another language several hours a day for months and months so you can check on your work orders from Japan? No need to worry about that anymore. Available exclusively on the RingPlus network, you now have the ability to speak almost 20 different languages on your RingPlus phone. Imagine being able to have an ongoing conversation with anyone in nearly any language.

    All RingPlus Wireless services include our In-Call Cloud Translator. Just pick up the phone, dial any number, and when the other party answers, press ** on your keypad. Tell our cloud translator which language you wish to translate to, and then speak normally in your native tongue. Once you stop speaking, we'll automatically translate and playback the words you said to your partner in their native language. This is the future of telecom, and only available through our RingPlus Cloud.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Already have it..

      It's done via a very large call centre in Pune.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MICROSOOOOOOOOOOOFT.......

    FUCK YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!

    COMING AGAIN TO SAVE THE MOTHER FUCKING DAY YEAAAAAAAAAAAH!

    Microsoft, uniting the world, bringing peace and harmony to humanity through removing those nasty mis-understandings about someone's mother.

    Got to admit it - top shit.

  13. Katie Saucey

    Microsoft whips it out

    I imagine like most MS products v 1.0 through v 3.0 will be completely counterproductive (or just non functional), although it may result in more Spanish speakers brushing up on their English and vice versa, which can't be a bad thing.

  14. BongoJoe

    4 Candles

    I can't wait to put this sketch's script through it.

  15. Eddy Ito

    Finally something to help in those conferences with the groups in Noo Yawk and Noo Juysee.

  16. Jagged
    Unhappy

    Functions I actually want ...

    I would much rather they just develop a feature to close the bloody application in a single click

  17. Benjol
    Thumb Up

    Good job by the marketing guys/gals though. Nice video.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They spelt it wrong

    It should be Hype not Skype.

    1. Adam 1

      Re: They spelt it wrong

      Eye sea watt ewe did they're

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