Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
1–10 of 124 posts
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#2It's pretty incredible how far language-to-language technologies have come and how far they still have to go.
Very cool stuff.
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#3The big question is when do we see this in a real product. Many interesting innovations have come out of Microsoft research. It will be nice if they reach end users as well
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#4My 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'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. Corporate pages are often translated paragraph by paragraph by humans which results in perfect raw data to train these algorithms. Also for example all documents that the European Parliament produces are translated into the languages of all member states.
Everything that has to do with translation has to do with context. I think the software right now is as smart as a six year old kid, except that it has a much bigger vocabulary. But if you say "The process has stalled. Let's kill it." it probably only makes sense if you know you are talking about computers.
It's hard to imagine that computers one day might really understand everything we say. But just by using Google Translate I think they really might. Это является удивительным. (I don't speak Russian. I hope I didn't insult anyone now. ;))
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#5My 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 translating by hand, not the companies which just throw all of their material into Google Translate and consider it a finely proofed document. There are plenty of the latter which makes for an amusing loop in the system.
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#6you can jump to 6 minutes and read the text to save time. chinese voice starts at about 7:30.
it is pretty neat.
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#7Skip 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.
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#8My 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…
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.)
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#9My 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…
Speech Recognition would probably be best fed in the same way - find a neutral-sounding speeches for which transcripts exist.
Best would be parliamentary speeches with transcipts, and the closed captioning for national news programs. The main constraint is storage space/computational power.
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#10I have no doubt a few more long years will have to pass until those solutions reach the mass market, but this is extraordinary especially for someone like me, passionate about travelling. Our generation witnessed the shift towards cheaper flights, easier accommodation booking and web/mobile tools growing year by year becoming more helpful in organizing our visits and seeking information about places and cultures we don't know. We, or the future generation, will probably witness the fall of the language barrier, it's truly amazing and one of the most important shifts in our global experiences.