
Microsoft demos breakthrough in real-time translated conversations - ghosh
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations.aspx#.U4Vd5DM4Cw8.twitter
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moconnor
Bilingual speaker here: the German translation produced was very poor quality
compared to the English one; the German speaker was enunciating excessively
clearly, sitting in a sound studio and sticking to short, simple phrases with
clear grammar.

From that point of view the demo was misleading - we heard an English speaker
talking naturally and heard clear responses, but the other side of the
conversation was quite broken, although possible to understand.

If both sides were speaking in real world settings the demo would have been
honest but far less impressive to casual watchers.

Despite this misdirection I am still impressed with the amount it did manage
to translate from the long, naturally-spoken English sentences.

~~~
alister
> _the German translation produced was very poor quality compared to the
> English one_

They would have selected the best possible language pair for this demo, so we
should expect it to have done very poorly if they picked, say,
English<->Mandarin.

What stands out is that they didn't pick Spanish as the other language.

It's pretty universally agreed that Spanish[1] is the easiest language for
English speakers to learn, and Portuguese is in the same ballpark[2], but
German is significantly harder[3]. (And Russian, Chinese, and Arabic would be
way to the right on an exponential graph.)

I'm guessing that machine translation of English<->German, for some reason,
must be easier than English<->Spanish.

[1] There's a fairly authoritative study on this which I can't find it
immediately.

[2] Just from personal experience I find that English<->Portuguese with Google
Translate is astonishingly good (in either direction):
[http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Getting_by_with_just_...](http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Getting_by_with_just_English_and_without_Portuguese#Google_Translate_for_2-way_conversation)

[3] The difficulty of German vs Spanish is confirmed by an NSA (!) document
that says that "Next to Vietnamese, German may be the most difficult for
English-speaking students to learn for German has a difficult syntactical
feature, the discontinuity of the predicate, which the others lack. Among
French, Italian, and Spanish, there also seems to be only a slight difference
in difficulty. It appears that these three are the easiest languages for
English-speaking students to learn":
[http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/f...](http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/foreign_language.pdf)

~~~
nitid_name
While English <-> Spanish shares the romance language cognates (generally
speaking, higher English comes from French, which shares a common ancestry),
English <-> German shares grammar.

I imagine the vocabulary isn't as difficult for machines to process as
grammar.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
>which shares a common ancestry

English shares no ancestry with French. However, in 1066 England was invaded
by the Normans, leading to the entire aristocracy and upper classes speaking
Norman French, causing a lot of French vocabulary to enter the English
Language. Most of these words are for stuff in higher registers, though. The
basic vocabulary in English is entirely Germanic (it's nigh-on impossible to
write a sentence with only French words in English), while much of the more
advanced or formal stuff is French (or Latin or Greek).

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mcmire
"Who thought you could have fun with the Germans?" Really, Kara?

Anyway, obviously there were a couple of mistakes by the speech recognition,
and they were taking care to speak very clearly, but still, I'm impressed. The
future looks bright.

~~~
m_mueller
I hate her live appearances with a passion (can't speak of her articles). How
can someone that annoying get the best interviews in the industry? As an
example, the landmark Bill Gates / Steve Jobs sitdown - all she did was annoy
with sudo sexual innuendo, completely trivial questions and played up drama.

~~~
platz
I was surprised that Musk interviewed with them.

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nivla
Kudos to Microsoft Research. It is very impressive especially given that it
was an actual long distance live demo. Although that funny Blooper from
Vista's speech recognition [1] will always remain stuck in my mind.

I am guessing this is going to be the part of our future where language
barrier slowly becomes the thing of the past. The most intriguing part of this
demo was where Satya says that Machine learning technology gets better at
previous languages as new languages are introduced. That in itself is an
accidental revolution.

[1] [http://youtu.be/kX8oYoYy2Gc?t=43s](http://youtu.be/kX8oYoYy2Gc?t=43s)

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CookWithMe
As someone who is a native German speaker, I wasn't impressed. The translation
to English was much better - because she spoke very clearly, slowly, and with
simple grammar.

The translation was no better than, say Google Translate. A mashup of Siri +
Google Translate wouldn't have been any worse, and both technologies exist for
some years. This is, unfortunately, hardly a breakthrough. Rather a 24h API
hackathon project ;)

~~~
pmelendez
" A mashup of Siri + Google Translate wouldn't have been any worse, and both
technologies exist for some years."

I have seen those already and they don't work nearly as well as this one. I
guess the lady was trying really hard to do not screw up the demo and that
might actually reduce the wow effect for German speakers.

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Piskvorrr
ObXKCD: [http://xkcd.com/678/](http://xkcd.com/678/)

In other words, this has come a long way since "Dear aunt, let's set so double
the killer delete select all", but I've seen enough "automated translation
breakthroughs" to remain highly sceptical.

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rlu
Reminds me of this from a few years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-
nlQqFCKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg)

I feel like they should merge the two. The subtitles are a nice touch, but if
it could capture the voice of the speaker it would be truly magical.

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DennisAleynikov
Back in April, at a hackathon sponsored in part by Microsoft, me and my
friends built something we called Unilingo which was a working model of this
idea! At the time we wondered why no other video chat applications did
anything like this, but now it seems Microsoft stepped up to the plate and
added translation to Skype!

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ape4
Human interpreters (like at the UN) will be speaking and listening at the same
time since the speaker doesn't wait for them. I was hoping for that.

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nsxwolf
Anyone bothered by Nadella's comment that "...quite frankly none of us know
exactly why" the system improves at one language when it learns another?

What's going on there? Someone must know, no?

~~~
msaroufim
I believe Nadella was referring to a more general sentiment in the machine
learning community about our lack of theoretical understanding of deep neural
nets. I'd suspect that the network still learns some higher level features
that exist across languages which is why it could become better in English
after learning German.

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bsaul
I know two sentences of german, and spotted one blattant mistake right from
the first sentence : "wie gehts dir" and not "wie dir's geht". Not impressed
as well.

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WorkingClassDev
Fair play to Microsoft. Thats some impressive tech.

~~~
Schwolop
Indeed. I wonder if they'll also want to call it Babel Fish?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Babel_Fish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Babel_Fish)
just confused me more, and I've now no idea who actually owns the trademark
rights to that term. (It was AltaVista, bought by Yahoo!, spun-off into Bing
Translate, which was partially bought by Microsoft, and ... I'm lost... )

~~~
frik
Yahoo/Altavista Bablefish and Google Translation (til 2007) were based on
SYSTRAN software:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systran](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systran)
(a desktop version for offline usage is even available)

Now, both Bing Translator and Google Translation use a technology called
statistical machine translation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation)

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vayarajesh
Few years back when Google was working on Google Wave project (the new email)
they also had done a similar translation.. but i think it was only at text and
document level. Microsoft has come up with some real problem solving solutions
specially when the world is more Globally connected. Kudos to Microsoft
research.

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eyeareque
I remember seeing an article a few years back about msft filing a patent for
automatic language translation for instant message. Maybe that is why we
haven't seen this done by anyone else?

~~~
stinos
Possibly - but maybe also because it apparently requires years and years of
research to get to something that works properly. Not a lot of companies have
the amounts of money and staff for that.

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frik
I remember some IBM TV-ads with a similar realtime IBM ViaVoice speech
technology, more than 10 years ago.

It was about a girl that answers a call in english, talking to an arabic
speaking client of her father.

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aw3c2
Could someone share a direct link to the video or a mirror? It is not
available without Flash.

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IBalic
This was actually really impressing

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hellbreakslose
The way this is going, would take an eternity to communicate!

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iagooar
But it is: a) less expensive than getting a human translator b) faster than
finding a human translator c) a good support for people who speak a little bit
of the other's language to provide an additional help for understanding each
other d) still far from perfect

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benjaminva
I wonder why people are so excited about this. It's voice recognition coupled
with an automated translator and a text-to-speech tool. Sure it all has to
work fast enough but the English-to-German translation is horrible and
probably much worse than a Google translate of the same sentence. For me as a
native German speaker I would have been embarrassed being a Microsoft employee
if they advertise something like that as "revolutionary" \- it's not!

