said it will release a translation app for Windows and other operating systems from rivals Apple Inc. But it’s a great start on breaking down some language barriers for now.Microsoft Corp. Skype Translator certainly hasn’t solved the problem just yet. “I think it’s still unclear where the limits of deep learning are for solving higher-level cognitive processing problems.” Further advances could someday make real-time machine translation virtually perfect.
Researchers at Google and the University of Montreal are applying such methods to speech translation itself (as opposed to just speech recognition) “with stunning success,” according to Stanford’s Manning. Other efforts to harness deep learning could help. “But when you start digging into the actual implementation and put it in people’s hands to use, there are so many little details that can make or break the experience.” “When we watch these things in action on TV, it seems so obvious: you just speak and it comes out translated,” he says.
SKYPE TRANSLATE BOT SOFTWARE
And obvious mistakes are easy to correct, since either party can type into the chat window where the translations appear.ĭendi admits that Skype and Microsoft still don’t know yet what an ideal user experience for the software looks like. This interface is less overtly futuristic than spoken translation, but it feels more natural. Introducing an on-screen avatar for the “bot” might also help reinforce the metaphor of a third person on the call, perhaps making it easier for the two human speakers to modulate their conversation in a way that makes room for the software speaking on their behalf.īut Skype Translator actually has a fairly elegant solution built in already: on-screen translated text of the spoken conversation, generated in real time. With practice I could probably learn Skype Translator’s “rhythm” in the same way, which could make the audio experience less distracting. “Even with human translators, you need to learn when to pause to let the interpreter absorb what you just said and repeat it,” says Vikram Dendi, strategy director at Microsoft Research. This is something we humans sometimes find challenging, too. Skype Translator is also deaf to the rhythms of normal spoken conversation, so you can’t be quite sure when its disembodied robot voice is going to break in and start blurting out its translated version. “If software is translating between American and British English, and it recognizes the word ‘football,’ it also needs to know when to change it to ‘soccer’ and when to keep it as ‘football’ or ‘gridiron,’” says Christopher Manning, a professor of linguistics and computer science in Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group.
Determining which meaning of a word is appropriate in different contexts can be vexing. The limitations of Skype’s translation software are also revealing, since they show how difficult it is for even the smartest machine to mimic the subtleties of effective human conversation. Some of these disfluencies made it through during my conversation, but the translation still occurred with impressive speed and accuracy. Microsoft’s software tries to filter out “disfluencies” (such as “um,” “ah,” and repetitions) on the word and sentence level.
As more people use the software, this system should become more effective at recognizing idiosyncrasies of accent and cadence, potentially making Skype Translator-and Skype itself-more useful. Deep learning lets Microsoft’s computers reliably transform a stream of audio speech into chunks of text, which can then be analyzed using standard translation methods.
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