microsoft skype translator chalanges rate

#Microsoft skype translator chalanges rate software

They would have to teach the machine, and the machine would have to learn. To create a working speech-to-speech translation technology, MSR researchers knew they would have to teach their system to not only translate one word to the same word in another language based on a standard set of rules, but to understand the meaning of words and sentences. Half a beat after you stop speaking, an audio translation plays Their lofty goal: To make it possible for every human on Earth to communicate with any other human on Earth To do so, Microsoft Research (MSR) had to solve some major machine learning problems while pushing technologies like deep neural networks into new territory. Department of Defense-have not yet been able to do. The product of more than a decade of dedicated research and development by Microsoft Research (Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011), Skype Translator does what several other Silicon Valley icons-not to mention the U.S. Skype plans to incrementally add support for more than 40 languages, promising nothing short of a universal translator for desktops and mobile devices. The new function, called Skype Translator, translates voice calls between different languages in realtime, turning English to Spanish and Spanish back into English on the fly.

'We published those results, then the world changed,' he said.Earlier this week, roughly 50,000 Skype users woke up to a new way of communicating over the Web-based phone- and video-calling platform, a feature that could’ve been pulled straight out of Star Trek. The results were 'stunning,' a 25 percent boost in speech recognition accuracy, Microsoft Research head Peter Lee told us earlier this year. Microsoft soon ponied up the funds so that Hinton's ideas could be tested out with the latest graphical processor units. The invited speaker, University of Toronto's Geoff Hinton, had developed a machine learning model that mimicked neurons in the human brain, gradually building a deeper and deeper understanding of things such as English speech. But the work that led to Skype Translate's most startling breakthrough-the ability to reliably recognize almost anybody's speech-began just before Christmas 2009, when Microsoft sponsored a mini-symposium on the technology in Whistler, British Columbia.

Microsoft was tinkering with neural networks nearly a decade before Google's cat videos, to improve the handwriting recognition on tablet PCs, Microsoft researcher John Platt recently told WIRED. >We published those results, then the world changed That work led directly to a big boost in Android's voice recognition software, but behind the scenes, Microsoft was quietly laying the groundwork for Skype translate. They hit the mainstream in 2012 when Google announced that it had used deep neural nets to recognize cat videos on YouTube. Neural networks have been around since the 1980s, but they're experiencing a renaissance. 'One of the largest, published, untouched machine translation repositories on the internet is the Microsoft customer support Knowledge Base,' says Vikram Dendi, strategy director with Microsoft Research.īut voice recognition has come a long way in the past few years, thanks in large part to a burgeoning field of artificial intelligence research known as deep neural networks.

Microsoft is already using some of the text translation technology underpinning Skype Translate to power its Bing Translate search engine translation service, and to jump start the foreign language translation of its products, manuals, and hundreds of thousands of support documents.

#Microsoft skype translator chalanges rate software

It's called the Skype Translator-a Skype add-on that listens to the English words you speak into Microsoft's internet phone-calling software and translates them into Spanish, or vice versa.Īs you can see from demos like the one below, it's an amazing technology, and it's based on work that's been going on quietly inside Microsoft's research and development labs for more than a decade. Very soon now, a select group of Skype beta testers will have a new Microsoft technology that seems borrowed from the world of Star Trek.