Sure. I'm totally going to believe some voice-activated thing is going to work this well. Like if I say, "Hello, how are you?" it won't think I said, "Hell boo! Shower you?"
Especially if this is a Skype feature, a program that's been around so long and still as broken as ever.
[QUOTE=Robman8908;48571435]Sure. I'm totally going to believe some voice-activated thing is going to work this well. Like if I say, "Hello, how are you?" it won't think I said, "Hell boo! Shower you?"
Especially if this is a Skype feature, a program that's been around so long and still as broken as ever.[/QUOTE]
Probably true, but I really would like something like this to be made and work. There's something about clicking on an option to pass the language barrier that really excites me.
Hah! No fucking way.
Have you tried translating anything but "Hello!" in chinese? If it's 10% accurate, i'm impressed.
And i'm talking about text.
Even experts in machine translation have admitted that it will never, ever be as good as human translation
[editline]29th August 2015[/editline]
we all know how quickly translation flies off the fucking rails even in just text
[QUOTE=Robman8908;48571435]Sure. I'm totally going to believe some voice-activated thing is going to work this well. Like if I say, "Hello, how are you?" it won't think I said, "Hell boo! Shower you?"
Especially if this is a Skype feature, a program that's been around so long and still as broken as ever.[/QUOTE]
I'm assuming it uses the same underlying system as Bing translate. Here's your post translated to Chinese and back:
[quote]Confirm. I have to believe some of the voice started to work very well. Like if I said, "Hello, how are you?" It does not think that what I said, "hell Shh! bathe you?"
Especially if this is a Skype function, procedure, have been around for such a long time, still as broke as ever.[/quote]
Google translate's attempt for comparison:
[quote]
Of course . I fully believe the voice of some of the things that is going to work . Like if I say: " ? Hey, how you doing ," it will not think I said , "Hell Hush bathe you! ? "
Especially if it is a Skype function , which is going through so much , is still the same as breaking the previous program .
[/quote]
For English to Chinese, those translations are actually fucking amazing.
Microsoft is spending a lot of effort on speech recognition and text to speech technology, and this is one application of that. The underlying translation, almost certainly text based, is still pretty shit as we all know.
I hate that online translation services from Google and Microsoft are so dishonest (by being opaque) about their capabilities, particularly because their terrible performance for certain languages is not immediately apparent to the people who need to know the most: the people who use these services for languages they don't know themselves. I've met people who think these services is an excuse not to study language. I can only guess they've never actually tried to use them to communicate with another person.
I love the speech recognition and TTS work that Microsoft is doing but I wish it was openly available. I'd love to use their technology on Linux without having to go through some elaborate emulation layer.
edit:
And that's just for the stuff available offline. Speech recognition and translation is increasingly moved to online services because smartphones can't handle the computational cost, making their tech even harder to use for hobbyists :(
[QUOTE=Kommodore;48571490]Even experts in machine translation have admitted that it will never, ever be as good as human translation[/QUOTE]
Eh they always say that, and then advances happen.
I don't think we'll get a nearly decent translator anytime soon, but it will happen eventually.
[video=youtube;Nu-nlQqFCKg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg[/video]
I don't speak Chinese, but this Chinese crowd seems really impressed with the translation as they clap and cheer whenever he says anything and it's translated. And this was a beta.
[url]www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/[/url]
Going to try this tomorrow with my Chinese friend
Ooh, they have it in French so I can see if it translates stuff in a similar way to how I personally would.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;48572222][video=youtube;Nu-nlQqFCKg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg[/video]
I don't speak Chinese, but this Chinese crowd seems really impressed with the translation as they clap and cheer whenever he says anything and it's translated. And this was a beta.[/QUOTE]
The problem in machine translation is not the translating words part, it's the context behind the words and the meaning it has in the sentence. Things like metaphors and slang, or words spelt the same with different meanings, will never be translated correctly. Unless there is some amazing breakthrough..
The dude in the video didn't really push the boundaries of translation.
I'm confused about one thing:
If they needed the Skype translate-thing to communicate properly, how the hell did they communicate while strutting through the nature? Did they just communicate in grunts and nods?
[QUOTE=endorphinsam;48573491]The problem in machine translation is not the translating words part, it's the context behind the words and the meaning it has in the sentence. Things like metaphors and slang, or words spelt the same with different meanings, will never be translated correctly. Unless they're is some amazing breakthrough..
The dude in the video didn't really push the boundaries of translation.[/QUOTE]
It's probably not going to happen in the foreseeable future, but good machine translation that accounts for context should be possible with some kind of simulated/synthetic intelligence. Of course this would include true A.I., but I don't think that's a requisite unless you want it to really understand deep existential poetry...
Microsoft have been working on almost live translation shit for a while
Last year (or this year idk) at BUILD, they translated the live stream into almost every language using bing™
worked very well for what I was able to see
Skype Translator is actually a lot better than what people expect it would be based on text translators, whereas voice translation is still somewhat new.
If you can find a demo of it in action, watch it. I think Neowin's Brad Sams might have done a real world demo of his own and it turned out to be pretty good.
Found this article if anyone wants to get into some nitty-gritty
[url]http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/translator-052714.aspx[/url]
came out about a year ago
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;48572222][video=youtube;Nu-nlQqFCKg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg[/video]
I don't speak Chinese, but this Chinese crowd seems really impressed with the translation as they clap and cheer whenever he says anything and it's translated. And this was a beta.[/QUOTE]
Perhaps one day we'll be able to just strap on some goggles and speak any language.
Why goggles? Dunno.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;48573761]Skype Translator is actually a lot better than what people expect it would be based on text translators, whereas voice translation is still somewhat new.
If you can find a demo of it in action, watch it. I think Neowin's Brad Sams might have done a real world demo of his own and it turned out to be pretty good.[/QUOTE]
It uses text translation under the hood.
Speech Recognition -> Text in input language -> Text in output language -> Speech Synthesis
If the translation is surprisingly accurate, then it's because the text translation is better than you expected.
Has anyone tried running the preview? I try opening it and it just loads forever.
Holy shit, it's this advertisement.
I read the blog post of the guy in the ad months ago, he said the damn thing was completely fucked, and the Great Firewall was also causing problems. But I hadn't actually seen the ad.
I've toyed with live chat text translation of Korean and Japanese (using both bing and google translate as backends) and in my experience it's easier to just send photos that describe what you mean with very very simple sentences or words. I don't know if Chinese is any better since I don't know anyone from China but initially I thought Japanese worked well so I dunno.
I hope the Skype voice recognition isn't based on the same engine that Cortana uses.
Or else you'll be saying "Wanna get some duck after class?" and the Chinese guy on the other end will be receiving "Want to fuck me in the ass?"
I'll try this tomorrow - I remember it being pretty precise in Spanish (there's ~10 minute video somewhere on youtube), though that's of course totally different from Chinese.
[QUOTE=Snickerdoodle;48577310]I hope the Skype voice recognition isn't based on the same engine that Cortana uses.
[/QUOTE]
In all likelyhood it is.
Nothing translates it better than learning the language yourself and picking your own words. Hell for the effort it takes to talk to someone with using this you may as well have learnt a bit of the language
[QUOTE=endorphinsam;48573491]The problem in machine translation is not the translating words part, it's the context behind the words and the meaning it has in the sentence. Things like metaphors and slang, or words spelt the same with different meanings, will never be translated correctly. Unless there is some amazing breakthrough..[/QUOTE]
I know I'm saying it like it's a no brainer, but couldn't you just set it up to interpret the context of any given word judging by the rest input given (both before and afterwards)? Slang is still language, and translates to something, so that could still be set up over time.
[QUOTE=SgtTupelo;48573559]I'm confused about one thing:
If they needed the Skype translate-thing to communicate properly, how the hell did they communicate while strutting through the nature? Did they just communicate in grunts and nods?[/QUOTE]
He said he speaks basic mandarin
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