For Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise, seeking out new life and new civilizations would not have been much use without a universal translator to deal with new languages too. Fortunately for the denizens of the 23rd century, Microsoft has begun making it a reality, two centuries early.
The company unveiled a new service for Skype on Tuesday that can understand spoken words and translate them into another language, and speak them back almost in real time.
Skype Translator is to be available for Windows 8 before the end of the year, after 15 years of research, but Microsoft intends to make the service available to other platforms. Skype currently has 300 million monthly users spread across TVs, computers, tablets and smartphones.
“Skype has always been about breaking down barriers. And the language barrier is huge. It has been a blocker to productivity and human connection,” said Gurdeep Pall, corporate vice president of Skype and Lync at Microsoft in a blog post. “Skype Translator helps us overcome this barrier. It’s going to make sure you can communicate with anyone without language barriers.”
Pall demonstrated the technology at the Code conference in California on Tuesday, showing real-time translation of a Skype video call with a German colleague.
Pall was speaking English, allowing the translation system to then convert his speech into spoken German, while his video caller spoke German allowing Pall and the audience to hear the translation into English in near real-time.
The system only made a few mistakes in the three-minute-long conversation, demonstrating the improved word, meaning and order recognition Microsoft has made since the technology was first demonstrated translating English to Chinese two years ago.
“It is early days for this technology, but the Star Trek vision for a Universal Translator isn’t a galaxy away, and its potential is every bit as exciting as those Star Trek examples,” Pall said. “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.”
Machine translation research has been ongoing for decades, while Microsoft’s own machine translator research started 15 years ago, first with text-based translation and later with voice recognition and dictation technologies that have been present in Microsoft Office and Windows since 2001.
“It’s not just about daisy-chaining speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said. “It’s a deep neural net that you build that synthesizes a model to be able to do speech recognition in pretty magical ways.”
A neural network is a computer system that can “learn” to recognize inputs and generate outputs rather like a group of nerves in the brain.
Microsoft acquired Skype, which is based in London, in May 2011 for US$8.5 billion — its largest purchase at the time. Skype is the most-used voice and video chat service globally, but is facing increasing pressure from other messaging services, including Facebook’s WhatsApp, Google’s Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia