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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

#71

Post by dizzystar »

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…

Google Translate's English to Chinese is plain awful as well. At my last job, many of the employees only spoke Mandarin. If I had to communicate with them, I would use Google Translate and copy/paste the Chinese and the English for CYA. There was 2 people who spoke good English and Mandarin, so they were able to correctly translate the meaning. From what they told me, the translations were about 60 to 70% accurate and often comical. I guess the translations never asked my coworkers on a date or cursed them out, but ultimately, outside of the fact that my correspondence never happened unless it was an important issue and thus alerted the recipients that there is a pressing issue, the translations didn't serve much purpose. It was better than zero communication. There just has to be a lot of work done in the field.

I also disagree that having someone doing the translations on the webpage is a good source. One only needs to find Asian companies with direct translations to see how bad the human translations are. Just as those companies generally don't have good English writers, I think it is likely that American companies probably don't have outstanding Japanese / Chinese / et.al. writers.

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

#72

Post by nandemo »

thejsjunky wrote: post #68
jpatokal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 become…

> 上, 神, 紙, 髪, and 加味 are all pronounced かみ.

This can be mostly solved by context. There are very few situations in normal speech where you'd hear "kami" and not know if they're talking about 神 (god) or 髪 (hair). Also, it's not particularly hard to code that knowledge. E.g. try かみにいのる (pray to god) and かみのけをきった (cut hair) on Google Translate. It will suggest the correct kanji in both cases.

Anyway, I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I find the whole homophone thing a bit overrated. As far I as can recall the only pair of homophones that cause trouble in normal speech are 科学/化学 (both pronounced kagaku, meaning science/chemistry) and 私立/市立 (shiritsu, private/municipal).

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

#73

Post by boucher »

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

Geoffrey Hinton (who leads this research at the University of Toronto) is teaching a coursera course right now about machine learning with deep neural networks:

https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001

He talks about a surprising amount of cutting edge achievements being made by deep neural networks just over the last few months.

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

#74

Post by jiakeliu »

Native Chinese speaker here. I just tried the same sentences from the video on Google Translate on my Android tablet and Bing Translator on my Windows Phone. The video has almost all of the words right with very few grammar errors. Quite decent tonality to boot. Bing has almost all of the words right but with weird grammar (mostly wrong word order/sentence structure), with comparable tonality to the video. Google picks up my sentences and translates quicker than the rest (might be due to Nexus 7's raw power) with great accuracy in the vocabulary. But the grammar is worse than the others. For example it butchered the sentence "I hope you enjoy the rest of the presentation today" which it translates to "我希望你享受休息的演示" which literally means "I hope you enjoy the presentation of resting." The tonality is very much robotic. I'd declare Microsoft winner here. Maybe it has something to do with Google being ousted by the Chinese government :P

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

#75

Post by joering2 »

Mark my words; some good changes are happening at MSFT. There are some indicators that suggest this may be a come back. Surface seems to gain momentum, while future of OS Windows will be freemium plus ads (as you can imagine hundreds of millions of "screens" plugged in).

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

#76

Post by sneak »

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…

> That's a broadening experience and an intellectual delight.

I disagree. It's only broadening in the additional people it allows you to commune with. Other than that, it's a waste of time.

Having to convert between languages (I'm a native speaker of English who lives in Germany) all the time is huge overhead, sort of like if every country had its own system of measurement, except that the overhead is incurred much more often, not just for measuring things.

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

#77

Post by thejsjunky »

nandemo wrote: post #72
thejsjunky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 become…

> 上, 神, 紙, 髪, and 加味 are all pronounced かみ. This can be mostly solved by context. There are very few situations in normal speech where you'd hear "kami" and not know if they're talking about 神 (god) or 髪 (hair). Also, it's not particularly hard to code that knowledge. E.g. try かみにいのる (pray to god) and かみのけをきった (cut hair) on Google Translate. It will suggest the correct kanji in both cases. Anyway, I'm not a native Ja…

Thanks for the reply.

> This can be mostly solved by context. T

Right, as I said. It's not too bad, but it's easier when you can just translate word for word.

かみにいのる gives me "pray to bite" on Google translate; as you say, it suggests the right kanji...but that's precisely my point. It needs you to disambiguate for it to be sure.

I'm not saying this is an insurmountable problem, I'm contrasting the difficulty.

> There are very few situations in normal speech where you'd hear "kami" and not know if they're talking about 神 (god) or 髪 (hair).

I ran into it recently in music. Babymetal has a song that starts:

伝説の黒髪を華麗に乱し

When you listen to the song, it'd be easy to momentarily think she might be saying "black god" or "black paper" since while the pronunciation wouldn't be identical, it's pretty close. Since I'm human, I figured out pretty quickly what she is saying...but in the equivalent English phrase there's no issue there...it's "black hair" or "black paper".

This is admittedly not "normal speech", but I could see it popping up there too.

I've seen confusion over 神/髪 in other situations too, though those were deliberately puns so probably don't count, but demonstrate it's possible to have situations where it's at least somewhat ambiguous.

> I find the whole homophone thing a bit overrated

I'm sure it's exaggerated to me because my Japanese is pretty atrocious, but I think my point is valid: any time you have homophones in a language it makes things more difficult to set up a system that listens to speech and translates. Japanese seems to have more homophones than English, and if that's true it is proportionally more difficult to translate in that regard.

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

#78

Post by bobwaycott »

Damnit. This is pretty much the very idea I had in college around 12 years ago. At the time, there was nowhere near the required technology to pull this off. Over the last few months, I'd begun rethinking through the idea again, feeling the time was right to pull this off as a killer idea. Even began trying to investigate how to pitch this to create a startup focused solely on this problem.

Now it seems the time may be too late. Rats.

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

#79

Post by hnewser1 »

bobwaycott wrote: post #78

Damnit. This is pretty much the very idea I had in college around 12 years ago. At the time, there was nowhere near the required technology to pull this off. Over the last few months, I'd begun rethinking through the idea again, feeling the time was right to pull this off as a killer idea. Even began trying to investigate how to pitch this to create a startup focused solely on this problem. Now it seems the time may…

You are a bit naive, eh? Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator

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

#80

Post by bobwaycott »

hnewser1 wrote: post #79
bobwaycott wrote: post #78

Damnit. This is pretty much the very idea I had in college around 12 years ago. At the time, there was nowhere near the required technology to pull this off. Over the last few months, I'd begun rethinking through the idea again, feeling the time was right to pull this off as a killer idea. Even began trying to investigate how to pitch this to create a startup focused solely on this problem. Now it seems the time may…

You are a bit naive, eh? Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator

Naive in what regard exactly?

EDIT: Oh, I see. You think I think I had this idea first and out of nowhere. Wrong.

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