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Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

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Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#61

Post by GFischer »

qq66 wrote: post #53
tokenadult wrote: post #15

To someone who spent years learning Chinese as a second language, and then made my living for years as a Chinese-English interpreter, that was pretty impressive. The economics of the issue is that a machine interpreter just has to be as good as a human interpreter at the same cost. That's a reachable target with today's computer technology. EVERY time I've heard someone else interpreting English or Chinese into the o…

I don't think there will be much of an impact on the interpreter industry until the machine translations are significantly better than human translations. Human translators are so expensive today that they are only used in situations where the translation has to be correct -- diplomacy, courtrooms, books, etc. Until a machine is much better than a human, these use cases won't switch to machine translation (similarly,…

While machine translation is not ready yet, there are some incremental innovations in the interpreter industry.

A local entrepreneur is having some success with a remote system for interpreters that tries to replace the interpreter console and related expensive interpretation equipment:

http://www.glotweb.com/

Not sure how his has handled the strict no-lag requirements though, but they were doing trial runs in Washington and San Diego.

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#62

Post by boyter »

mpdaugherty wrote: post #14
Groxx wrote: post #7

Skip to 8 minutes to hear the actual translation. I'd love some comparison - that doesn't sound like the same voice to me (awfully close to the 'standard' computer voice, IMO), but some of it is crummy recording quality, and showing the flexibility would go a long way toward convincing me.

I agree that it doesn't really sound like him, but the voice is far better than most Chinese computer voices that I've heard and is totally understandable. Seems like my years of learning Chinese and living in China are about to become useless...

That was my opinion as well.

Actually I stopped learning Chinese and living in China because I discovered the following. They were learning English faster then I could learn Chinese, and I only needed to know enough to let them know I wasn't culturally insensitive.

Not sure where the quote was but it went along the lines of "Don't try to talk in their language, because you will make a hash of it and they will have the advantage."

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#63

Post by esolyt »

tummybug wrote: post #21

Couldn't this be easily hacked together using google translate and a text to voice program?

Google has already done something similar. It's called Google Translate Conversation Mode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyRQnflIv6Y

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#65

Post by borplk »

evoxed wrote: post #5
scrrr wrote: post #4

My current client is specialising in speech recognition, speech synthesis and automatic translation. They have something similar, focused on enterprise customers. I find this subject very interesting. I am a Ruby guy and I only marginally get in contact with their C++ code, but from what I learned so far this stuff is extremely memory and CPU hungry. It also depends on having been fed the right amounts of input. That…

> Corporate pages are often translated paragraph by paragraph by humans which results in perfect raw data to train these algorithms. Actually this may be one of the reasons why Google's Japanese translations are so terrible . The why isn't really relevant here[0] (perhaps you already know anyway) but it there are times when the raw data becomes the most misleading. [0] Obviously I still mean those actually translatin…

Yep I have tried the Google English-Japanese translation before and it was just plain terrible.

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#66

Post by zmmmmm »

As good as this is, it doesn't seem too much of a quantam leap from where Google Translate is, with conversation mode, installable in every Android phone.

I didn't hear the inflections in his voice superimposed on the Chinese voice, so it is just modeling his voice characteristics and reflecting that into output voice. From what I understand the voice modeling happened off line, not in real time, so it is not nearly as sexy as if it was happening as he spoke. In other words, a nice touch, but I don't see it as revolutionary (unless I'm missing something).

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#67

Post by zmmmmm »

zyb09 wrote: post #50

Fun thing to do: you can turn on transcribe audio on Youtube and directly compare how Google's speech recognition tech stacks up against Microsoft's.

I bet the audio directly from his mic would be enormously better quality than whatever YouTube has recorded. Plus Google can hardly afford to dedicate gigantic amounts of CPU to the transcription - they'll be going for a crude but useful job where for this demo he probably has a whole lot of CPU grunt just dedicated to it.

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#68

Post by thejsjunky »

jpatokal wrote: post #40
scrrr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speak bad Japanese after having worked there for a while. But Japanese is extremely context dependent. They leave out a lot of words and you just deduce the meaning. (Don't hit me if that's wrong, but that is what I remember thinking back when I was learning it.)

The way you phrase that is a bit misleading. It's not that Japanese speech has any less info than most languages, it's just that you can set topics (add state to a stack, to put it in geek terms) that carry over into subsequent phrases. The correct translation of an individual sentence may thus depend on that previous context. A simple but famous case is "Watashi wa hamburger desu". The sentence has no subject, so wi…

To clarify further for those unfamiliar with the language,a super literal translation of "watashi wa hanbaga desu" is something like:

    (concerning/as for) myself, (it's) hamburger.
On it's own if Bob says this, basically it comes out as "I (am) (a) hamburger".

However, if Sally has just said something like "I'll have a salad...what about you Bob?" then it makes sense as Bob's order is the implied subject and it becomes "My order is hamburger." or "I'll have hamburger."

I know very little about linguistics but I think there are a bunch of other things that make Japanese-English difficult to translate via software as well.

There is the whole aspect of culture embedded in it. あなた could mean "you" or something like "dear/sweetie" depending on the context. There also the question of how to translate "you" (etc) in English text to Japanese as you have to consider politeness etc. If you are just translating a business web page it's probably safe to stick with polite forms, but if you are translating say the dialogue in a TV show you want to preserve the tone of the characters.

In terms of voice recognition, Japanese seems to have a lot of homophones to me when compared to English. It may just be my imagination, but here are some I ran into recently:

舶,錘, 頭, 摘む, 積む, 詰む, and 紡錘 are all pronounced つむ and mean completely different things. Or 六, 碌, and 録 are pronounced ろく. 上, 神, 紙, 髪, and 加味 are all pronounced かみ.

I seem to run into things like that regularly; when just hearing it spoken you need the context to figure out what they mean.

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#69

Post by nahname »

zmmmmm wrote: post #66

As good as this is, it doesn't seem too much of a quantam leap from where Google Translate is, with conversation mode, installable in every Android phone. I didn't hear the inflections in his voice superimposed on the Chinese voice, so it is just modeling his voice characteristics and reflecting that into output voice. From what I understand the voice modeling happened off line, not in real time, so it is not nearly…

I would gladly have an hour long conversation with my computer once to be able to speak in another language.

Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

#70

Post by chewxy »

FrojoS wrote: post #30
paulgb wrote: post #11

This is the second time Deep Neural Network research from the University of Toronto has made the front page, the first being when it won first-place in a Kaggle competition http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4733335

Here is a GREAT talk by Geoffrey Hinton (the Prof running said lab) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78&hd=1 where he explains the method. Unfortunately, even though it was posted three times to HN http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=sex+machine... it never made the fron page. Here is the my summary and comment: " Great talk. I don't know much about artificial neural networks (ANN) and even less about…

We're too busy debating the merits of the new iDevice, or bashing people who debate the merits of the new iDevice, or wasting our upvotes on personality cults, upvoting every little thing said personality has written about.

Did I about cover all the problems with groupthink and hivemind?

It's a shame though, but I hang out in new a lot, and I urge other HN'ers to hang out there too.

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