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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

#91

Post by dobro »

sneak wrote: post #76
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 m…

That it can be cumbersome for an expat, doesn't mean it's not a broadening experience and an intellectual delight.

For broadening experience, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/language-and-bias/

And for intellectual delight, see: http://www.amazon.com/Le-Ton-Beau-De-Marot/dp/0465086454 http://books.google.gr/books/about/Experiences_in_Translatio...

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

#93

Post by rplnt »

zmmmmm wrote: post #67
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.

I really don't think youtube transcribes audio for every single user. You can see it's not available in many videos. I'd guess they run some test on the audio to see if it's worth transcribing, and only then run a background task to do the job.. doesn't really matter how fast.

You are right about the source quality though.

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

#94

Post by sneak »

zanny wrote: post #88
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Ever read 1984? A lot of linguists make arguements that our language shape the way we think and interact with the world, since at a young age we stop thinking visually and start thinking in spoken words. In 1984, newspeak was all about removing ways to describe things the Party didn't want the public thinking about, so that in several generations of the language nobody would be able to comprehend dissent. And it actu…

I am aware of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

German, for example, has no word for "silly", while English has no word for "gemütlichkeit".

Eliminating the overhead is worth any of these sacrifices, though.

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

#95

Post by aquarin »

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…

dropout paper: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/dropout.pdf

acoustics modeling: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/speechDBN_jrnl.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/DNN-2012-proof.pdf

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

#96

Post by ringm »

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…

This is not a unique feature of Japanese. You can do exactly the same in Russian using a dash (which translates to a short pause in speech): "я — гамбургер" (I — hamburger). In general "X — Y" means "X is Y" or another relationship between X and Y as indicated by preceding context.

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

#97

Post by Spearchucker »

sneak wrote: post #76
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 m…

It's broadening in many, many ways. nathannecro in his comment below highlights an intellectual aspect. There are others. Knowing -- I chose that word specifically, as opposed to "speaking" -- a language means knowing a culture. This broadens one's mind, and that in turn leads to acceptance. Acceptance of religions, of gays, and of the Japanese seemingly chasing Americans around meeting rooms. Amongst others. A notable other is that you realize just how insanely silly, myopic and stupid nationalism is.

There are subtler benefits - I speak three languages natively, and the part I love most about that is also the part that frustrates me most. Afrikaans is a modern language and has a relatively small vocabulary. Insulting someone therefore consists of creatively stringing together colourful combinations of everyday words, mixing in the odd English, Malaysian or Zulu word, and then spoken with a religious fervour that cracks you up. It's side-splittingly funny. What frustrates me is that no other language can do that, so I can't share that with my girlfriend, who is French.

German has similar mannerisms about it. It's naturally dry in a way that English, for all it's adjectives, can never hope to be.

To give you another perspective, I've always had a few deal-breakers I look for when meeting a girl I might otherwise be interested in. First, she needs to speak more than one language. Seconds, she needs to have spent a significant amount of time outside her own country. She must either be able to ski or snowboard. Last, she needs to be able to play a musical instrument. Beyond that I couldn't care less about race, job, creed, colour or any other bigoted perspective.

To know another language is to know another world.

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

#98

Post by DanBC »

jarek wrote: post #42
dchuk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

different languages emerged because of physical separation. As barriers have been reduced because of technology (both physical and communication barriers) there really aren't "borders" anymore. I can call someone in China right now if I wanted to, something impossible to do even just 100 years ago. So if we can all talk to each other across the world in real time, and we can all understand each other because of this…

> what exactly is the point of different languages anymore? True. This is why I will be teaching my children Basque and Basque only. New languages might have originally emerged due to separation, but that doesn't mean lack of separation will cause already existing languages to go away.

Not Basque and Spanish? Or Basque an English? Or Basque and some Chinese language?

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

#99

Post by bobwaycott »

epaga wrote: post #86
bobwaycott wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You erroneously conclude I think I am the first person to think of this. I do not. I know my sci-fi and biblical and human history (20 years of studying intellectual and cultural history, thank you). I've read about the tower of babel and grew up on wanting universal translators. My comment was a bit of bittersweet admiration at a very specific success in implementation. Can we just assume that the average person on…

Sorry to offend, I was just clarifying why the original guy said you sounded naive - just clarifying what specific implementation you had in mind would have helped in your original comment. I can see how it sounded as if you meant the idea "universal translator", can't you?

Honestly, it'd never even cross my mind that anyone on HN would possibly comment that s/he had come up with the idea of a universal translator 12 years ago.

Anyway, my apologies either way. Your comment read a tad snarky with the "grabbed away before you could create a startup" bit. I was left thinking, "Oh great. Relegated to the company of some kid who thinks his startup idea was stolen." My reply could have been tempered a bit more.

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

#100

Post by rmc »

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…

That's why Google Translate is so good. They have tons and tons of data from all the websites they parse, and in many cases the content can be obtained in different languages. … Also for example all documents that the European Parliament produces are translated into the languages of all member states.

This can backfire. I remember hearing that sometimes/back in the day "Baile Átha Cliath" (the Irish for "Dublin", the capital city of Ireland) would sometimes get translated as "London" the capital of the UK. This is due to Google Translate trying to match up Laws in Ireland (in the Irish language) with UK laws (which would be very similar or potentially based on the same original law). However in the Irish law "Baile Átha Cliath" would be replaced with "London".

Here's an example of it: http://translate.google.com/#ga/en/L%C3%A1%20alainn%20inniu%...

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