

Enabling Cross-Lingual Conversations in Real Time - denzil_correa
https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/translator-052714.aspx

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DennisAleynikov
At a hackathon back in April (which was sponsored in part by Microsoft), some
friends and I made a very similar working version [1] relying on Google's line
of products and the results were astonishingly good. Alas, it only works on
Chrome due to the speech api used is the built in chrome one.

It seems that Microsoft did something very similar to our implementation, by
simply daisy chaining existing language processing tools they had to make this
addition to Skype.

[1] [http://goo.gl/3wC6b7](http://goo.gl/3wC6b7)

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jacquesm
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

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zdean
From the demo, that doesn't feel like real time to me. I was more impressed
years ago by Google Wave's realtime translation via text far more than this
because it enabled what felt like 'normal' speed conversation (albeit via
text)...whereas this felt like you were conversing through a translator (which
doesn't feel like conversation at all). I may be missing the technical
achievement here, but in terms of end result, it feels very underwhelming.

Demo:
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27/microsoft-
demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations.aspx)

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smoyer
Related discussion from TechNet announcement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808505)

