Recently, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella was joined by Gurdeep Pall, Skype’s Vice President at the Code Conference in Palos Verdes, California. The conference showcased a potentially groundbreaking feature called “Skype Translator” for Skype which promises seamless translation of conversations between individuals who speak different languages in the form of voice and text almost instantaneously.
A small teaser of the technology, which has been under rigorous, ongoing research at Microsoft for the past fifteen years, was delivered by Gurdeep Pall in the conference giving a good idea on how exactly it will function. You may check out the video of the demonstration at the end of the article.
In the video call demonstration Gurdeep spoke with a German Microsoft employee, Diana Heinrichs, in English regarding his plans about visiting London. While both of them were busy talking, Skype Translator was working its magic by translating both languages back and forth via text and synthetic voice.
Towards the end of the demonstration a translation syntax bug cropped up in the translation of Diana’s words that reads: “I have many meetings with my colleagues in Redmond and I take the opportunity to see her fiancé my.”
Naturally, this means that the technology is still in its early stages of development and will need further work.
Apart from the syntax translation bug, Microsoft researchers revealed the difficulties they have faced over the years and the problems they are still face in refining the technology.
The technology is only as good as the data,One big focus has been to scale up the amount and kinds of data that go into the machine-learning training of these systems.
Another tough cookie to crack is the problem of speech disfluency where speakers make generous use of breaks, slang vocabulary and fillers while talking. This makes it hard for the translator to understand the user.
It’s not just repeating a single word. Sometimes, you’ll go three words into a sentence and then back up and restate it. In some languages, it’s more of a challenge than others, especially languages like Spanish, where words have to agree in grammatical gender.
In a blog post on the official Microsoft blog, Gurdeep Pall has discussed the Code tech event and mentioned the virtues of having such facility being made available to everyone in the world.
Skype Translator opens up so many possibilities to make meaningful connections in ways you never could before in education, diplomacy, multilingual families and in business.
Back in 2011, Microsoft bought Skype for US$8.5 billion which has been growing steadily and now nearly boasts 300 million monthly users. A beta version of Skype Translator is being planned to be released towards the end of the year. However, Microsoft is yet to reveal whether it will be free of charge or a premium feature.
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