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Microsoft Demos Skype Translation Tool Coming Later This Year [Updated]

A nice start, The big challenge comes from the context translation.

Languages with high context vs low context, like wife and husband 😛
 
Steve121178 said:
You will need to remind me what applications Apple have released in recent times that were worth bothering with.

Excluding operating systems, I genuinely can't think of any must-have software developed by Apple in recent times.
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Must-have? Nothing Apple makes is must-have for me. The only thing Microsoft makes that I find must-have is probably Office. I was merely commenting on stuff like Siri and these cleaver little AI features that the tech world seems obsessed with nowadays. Everything in that area, Microsoft appears to be rapidly becoming king of.
 
cariacou said:
2015, the year when people don't talk face to face anymore, even when in the same building
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Stop being so melodramatic. I don't even see how your comment is relevant to this article. Surely a more relevant observation would be "2015, the year when language stopped being a barrier to communication"
 
That wasn't real German

Like others already said here: That was no real German 😀 She didn't use any complicated phrases and everything was translated word by word. So like there would no grammar exist in Germany... at one point I understood the English Version but the translation was so bad, that even I as a native German speaker - living in Germany - would not have been able to understand it. It's the sentence where he asked her what she's doing in the US and why is she helping him with the Demo.
I hope you have a great trip was translated as something like: I hope you've got a huge journey.
All in all until now not really good but I wanna see and test it 😀
just because it would be real fun to destroy some grammar 😉
Greetings from Munich to all of you.
 
NightFox said:
Stop being so melodramatic. I don't even see how your comment is relevant to this article. Surely a more relevant observation would be "2015, the year when language stopped being a barrier to communication"
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Actually, he's kind of right. For the last 10 years I've worked in places where people e-mail or instant message people sitting within touching distance instead of talking to them.

Also, people have to send e-mails to cover their backs. There's no proof of a spoken conversation.
 
sualpine said:
Waste of time. Windows 9 should have been in public beta by now.
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If creditable, my view has Windows 9 suffering an orgy of cooks over UI and features after the Windows 8 fiasco. Thus, way too many things are in flux including how "flat" the UI should look after iOS 7 shipping.

Another big issue is the totally unexpected pushback of very long time MS developers (x4) refusing to code in C#. They may be resurrecting much rumored C interface to the Win64 API that's kicking around Redmond for almost five years now.

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sualpine said:
I disagree. Windows 9 will make or break Microsoft. I suppose that's why its taking longer. They recognize this also.
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Well said. If Windows 9 does not move Microsoft out of their PC-centric company mindset, their back is broken as a market leader. The recovery is transition to a legacy company like IBM, RIM and Unisys focusing on enterprise support.
 
Now at home I could listen to it: still laughing about some of the funny mistakes the system made. The English sounded much better compared to the German.
But as they said before: the neuronal net is still learning and getting better.

but I'm sure in a few month/years it get sirious and helpful. Want to hear it with Japanese ...
 
trekkie604 said:
just watched the video... that is extremely awesome. Except for the german lady's crazy eyes.
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Little background info: German is my native language.

In the demo, the German girl speaks unnaturally slow and accentuated - nobody speaks like this in the real world. She also pretended that she could make sense out of the translations that, well, quite often didn't make any sense at all.

E.g., the guy talked about "moving to London", and it was translated as "verschieben", which is a word that you would use when you push furniture out of the way. The correct translation would have been "umziehen". Actually, the entire sentence used wrong grammar, a wrong structure and was out of sequence. The translation sucked - but the lady simply responded with another scripted sentence.

The translation worked much better the other way around, I think - it seems that it is easier to translate from German to English than from English to German.

Nevertheless, it's great to see that somebody is working on such a technology. In the next step, I'd like to have a Google Glass app that can read lips and put subtitles under everything that people say. With every year that passes, my hearing is getting worse, so that is something that I would actually pay money for.
 
On one side: there is tremendous potential in tech like this and despite all our bitching and moaning about skype issues each day, skype has indeed allowed me to work together and communicate with people from all around the world (for way cheaper than with other options available for a long time, too) for many years, so i'm thankful for that =) .

But: The german lady obviously had to push really hard to speak in typical "I'm talking with a computer which doesn't understand well so i have to speak unnaturally slow and clear" way. Probably also why she had that crazy eyes look cause she was very likely super scared things could break badly any moment.
Whereas the English speaking fella could speak in quite natural way and it understood him.
Then on the side of what it translated, the English translation was way way closer to flawless, too. Not perfect, but mostly at least sensemaking sentences.
Speaking German natively, i can tell the stuff that came out on German side was way worse than the translation to English. Basically every sentence translated to German was completely broken. Still good enough to get the sense of it in most of the "sentences" but overall didn't seem much better than Google Translate if at all.
The one part where it messed up in quite funny way was when the German lady said i'm gonna meet my fiancé and the translation put out i'm gonna see her fiancé.
=)


So i have mixed feelings about it. On one side, yes, a lot of potential in it, always. And yes, its cool it does it live with audio.
On the other side, the output seems a lot like on Google translate level for other languages than English and i'm annoyed they are not nearly as good yet for other languages as they are for English. Come on guys, you have to push way more in the other languages.
 
pretty amazing stuff, goes nicely in line with Google purchasing the real time text translation app WordLens... learning languages might be a thing of the past soon...
 
ChristianJapan said:
A nice start, The big challenge comes from the context translation.

Languages with high context vs low context, like wife and husband 😛
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Yeah, there's the challenge.

I'd argue that pretty much anything a brain can work out, a programme should be able to too. But the problem with this system is that there are so many idiomatic phrases, and people are taking visual/voice cues from the speaker, and people have a whole world of information to reference if they don't immediately understand a word of phrase.

Meanwhile a programme probably just has a simple look-up table for converting words to another language, possibly with a limited selection of known phrases to look out for. Still a long, long way to go.
 
The technology certainly has a lot of potential, much like text based translation has come a long way since the original babelfish, after Google gobbled them up.

But as a native German speaker with good English skills, I have to say that the more complicated sentences that were translated into German were pretty bad. It didn't actually "make sense" all that much.

The simple German to English phrases were good, but overall, the performance is not any better than google translate. It's just the combination with speech recognition that is new.

But machine translation has its limits anyway. I work with professional translators every day and all I can say is that even intelligent, thinking human beings have a hard time translating correctly and in the exact sense of the original words.
 
Steve121178 said:
Actually, he's kind of right. For the last 10 years I've worked in places where people e-mail or instant message people sitting within touching distance instead of talking to them.

Also, people have to send e-mails to cover their backs. There's no proof of a spoken conversation.
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I'm not disputing that - but to throw this cliche (valid as it may be) into a thread about technology potentially improving our ability to communicate was totally knee-jerk and misplaced
 
German-Guy said:
I can only repeat the criticism made by others in this forum. The translation from english to german was really awful, i.e., not a even one sentence was translated correctly. Many of the translations weren't just slightly off but could only be understood when translated back to english (word by word) to get the meaning.

The german lady on the other hand, spoke super clear, very slow, and very unnatural, almost like a computer herself. She obviously spoke carefully selected phrases. In essence, this demo has shown nothing at all and I'm curious about the final product in particular when it comes to languages that are more different than english and german.
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While i admit you made many points, altought short phrases were mostly correct, swiss boy😉
 
locust76 said:
Yeah, the English <-> German Translation here makes absolutely no sense sometimes if you don't actually already know English and German, and know things like the fact that "Verschieben" and "Umziehen" both translate to "move" in English, but that one refers to an appointment and the other refers to actually relocating your household. That was a real facepalm moment for me and I turned the video off right there. Didn't need to watch any more after that.
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Agreed. I'm also a German native speaker and I would say about 70% of the English translation in German was nonsense. The near flawless results from German to English are largely due to the very careful and enunciated way the German speaker talks, which indicates that she must be some sort of language professional who knows exactly how to pronounce German syntax flawlessly for such a technology to get to those results. Not to mention the carefully drafted and rather basic conversation topics on the German side that made the reverse translation from German back to English seem a lot easier. I really like the idea of instant translation, it has something of the Star Trek universal translator, but judging from this demo, the technology doesn't seem ready yet. If even a German-English translation turns out so profoundly imperfect, given that both languages share common Germanic roots, then we will most likely have to wait another 5-10 years for this technology to work satisfactorily. For now, it's nothing more than a marketing gag that took advantage of the fact that the audience only understood one side of the conversation. This is very far from real-life application.
 
Translation

I'm from Germany... and I can tell you, this translation was ridiculous...! Not ONE line was correct.

LMFAO😀
 
Imaginator said:
The pendulum swings. Microsoft has done more progressive soul searching and innovation in the last 6 months than Apple has in the last 6 years.
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I would call their flurry of Surface tablets more like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, than innovation.
 
Peace said:
Correct me if I'm wrong but don't most Germans speak English ?

What is the purpose of this if most of the world speaks English ?

I can understand translating documents and such but what percentage of the user base is going to use this tool ?

More vapor ware from Microsoft .
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Not sure I would call it vaporware. Since we don't speak or have an official world language, a functioning translator would be a great step.

Key word being 'functioning'
 
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