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Microsoft Announces 'Skype Translator' Early Preview for Windows 8.1 Users

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Microsoft today announced that it's opening signups for an early preview of Skype Translator, a real-time language translation feature that it first showed off earlier this year at Re/code's Code Conference.

While the initial trial program will be limited to customers who own a Windows 8.1 computer or tablet, Microsoft is open to bringing Skype Translator to other platforms in the future.
The preview program will be free and will initially be available for Windows 8.1 computers and tablets only, and will kick-off with a limited selection of languages. That said, as part of the sign-up process, you'll have the chance to tell us which languages are important to you, what platforms you'd like to see added, and how you plan to use Skype Translator once it becomes available. We look forward to this feedback, as it will help enhance future releases.
Click to expand...
In a May demo of the Skype translation tool, a Skype employee conducted a conversation with a German-speaking colleague, with Skype providing real-time translation from German to English and vice versa. While the translation software did not perform perfectly, audience members at the time said its translation capabilities were "pretty good."

Microsoft also demoed the feature at its Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, showing off somewhat more polished translation capabilities. According to Microsoft, Skype Translator continually improves as it translates text back and forth from one language to another.

Microsoft Skype Translator Demo​
As with the demo, the early preview version of Skype Translator only works with a small number of languages, but Microsoft has plans to continually add additional languages to the app as development progresses.

Microsoft has previously said that after Skype Translator is beta tested on the Windows platform, it will be brought to Mac users.

Article Link: Microsoft Announces 'Skype Translator' Early Preview for Windows 8.1 Users
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/03/skype-translator-early-preview/
Not exactly real time. Someday we will have the Star Trek style universal translators that are real time.. :cool:
 
Wow. It would be amazing if the phone companies could start adding this to all phone calls.
 
The german translation is complete nonsense... random words, wrong grammar, impossible to understand.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen, every $1 iPhone app does a better job.

Horrific.
 
X-X said:
The german translation is complete nonsense... random words, wrong grammar, impossible to understand.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen, every $1 iPhone app does a better job.

Horrific.
Click to expand...

I was just about to say the same..... works pretty well from German to English though.
 
automatic translation machines are now so good you might not he could guess that this text has been produced in such a!
 
X-X said:
The german translation is complete nonsense... random words, wrong grammar, impossible to understand.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen, every $1 iPhone app does a better job.

Horrific.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the very first English phrase in the embedded video ('Good afternoon Melanie') is translated as: 'But after new Melanie' (or their respective counterparts in German where they don't make any more sense than they do in English). Essentially the translator parsed the English phrase as four separate words and translated them one by one. It misunderstood the 'good' as 'but', got the 'after' correct and again misunderstood the 'noon' as 'new'. Well, and it understood the last word as being a name that doesn't need translation.
 
X-X said:
The german translation is complete nonsense... random words, wrong grammar, impossible to understand.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen, every $1 iPhone app does a better job.

Horrific.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Non-functional translation on either end. Very poor result. Extremely poor. Great idea, but not ready for real-world use.
 
BigHonkingDeal said:
I was just about to say the same..... works pretty well from German to English though.
Click to expand...

No surprise, though. She was repeating phrases that were specifically tailored to translate well to English, and acted completely oblivious to the nonsensical German the software was throwing at her.

I don't know if the speech recognition performs any better than the current technology available in Windows and OS X, but the translation part doesn't look any more advanced than the current state of Bing's and Google's translation APIs.

The Skype integration is a nice touch, but the whole thing basically just looks like they assembled existing and well-known building blocks in a slightly different way.
 
The German sentences

Just for fun, here are the German sentences the software created, translated back into English:

Original:
"Good afternoon, Melanie. How are you?"
Output:
"But after new Melanie. How are you?"

Original:
"Sorry, Melanie, say that again."
Output:
"Melanie, say that again."

Original:
"Very well, thank you. I'm here at the Worldwide Partner Conference with 16.000 partners, on the big stage. So: No pressure."
Output:
"Well, thank you. I'm here, but world-wide partner conference with 16.000 Palm OS on the big stage. So, no pressure."

Original:
"Yes, I did see the world cup. Congratulations"
Output:
"Yes, I did see the congratulations for the World Cup."

Original:
"Very funny, Melanie. I'm more of a cricket fan."
Output:
"You full, Melanie. A cricket fan move."

Original:
[I'm too lazy to type the whole flight list]
Output:
[Also too lazy to transcribe. It's quite understandable, but the word order is all wrong. Just taken directly from English instead of re-arraging according to the rules of German grammar. So in the way as if I in English write like this would.]

Original:
"Thanks, Melanie. Good-bye."
Output:
"Thanks, Melanie. Good-bye."
 
troop231 said:
Not exactly real time. Someday we will have the Star Trek style universal translators that are real time.. :cool:
Click to expand...

With languages quite often having words in opposite order from each other, I'm not sure how real-time universal translators would work short of mind-reading.

For example, in English, we say "a blue car", but in French, it's "a car blue". So how would a real-time translator be able to speak in real-time without knowing in advance what the next word was?
 
X-X said:
The german translation is complete nonsense... random words, wrong grammar, impossible to understand.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen, every $1 iPhone app does a better job.

Horrific.
Click to expand...
I can't wait to see how **** up the Japanese or Chinese to English translations will be.

----------
coolfactor said:
With languages quite often having words in opposite order from each other, I'm not sure how real-time universal translators would work short of mind-reading.

For example, in English, we say "a blue car", but in French, it's "a car blue". So how would a real-time translator be able to speak in real-time without knowing in advance what the next word was?
Click to expand...
Human simultaneous interpretation is pretty good although I seriously doubt that machine translation will be able to catch up to human translators any time soon.
 
Mac Blog?

MacRumors > "Mac Blog" > "Microsoft Announces 'Skype Translator' Early Preview for WINDOWS 8.1 Users" :(

Why thank you for letting us know about this useless piece of info, MacRumors. Please follow up when there's something for OS X. Thank you.
 
coolfactor said:
With languages quite often having words in opposite order from each other, I'm not sure how real-time universal translators would work short of mind-reading.

For example, in English, we say "a blue car", but in French, it's "a car blue". So how would a real-time translator be able to speak in real-time without knowing in advance what the next word was?
Click to expand...

Maybe not *strict* real-time, but these translators could wait for you to finish a sentence (and it's up to them to determine the end of the sentence by analyzing it, and not simply wait for you to pause your speech) and then translate that sentence. As far as translation goes, I would still consider this real-time translation.

If you have said "a blue," it's only a fraction of a second later that you finish saying the word "car."
 
Yeah!

I love languages so much! Preserve all languages please world!



I love you All!!!
 
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