Microsoft Translation Software Converts English to Chinese in Real Time
By Karla Robinson
November 14, 2012
November 14, 2012
- At an October presentation in Tianjin, China, Microsoft’s chief research officer Rick Rashid demonstrated a software “that translates spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly, while preserving the unique cadence of the speaker’s voice — a trick that could make conversation more effective and personal,” reports Technology Review.
- Already, the technology has attracted significant interest, and Rashid’s presentation has spread across Chinese social media sites.
- “The system works by recognizing a person’s words, quickly converting the text into properly ordered Chinese sentences, and then handing those over to speech synthesis software that has been trained to replicate the speaker’s voice,” the article explains.
- “The software requires about an hour of training to be able to synthesize speech in a person’s voice, which it does by tweaking a stock text-to-speech model so it makes certain sounds in the same way the speaker does.”
- AT&T and Google have also made translation prototypes. However, neither can match a speaker’s voice.
- Microsoft’s system is based on neural network technology that mimics the processing pathways of brain cells. Rashid says the technique vastly improves recognition accuracy.
- “Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight,” he wrote in a blog post about the demonstration.
- “We don’t yet know the limits on accuracy of this technology — it is really too new,” Rashid says. “As we continue to ’train’ the system with more data, it appears to do better and better.”
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