Microsoft Demos Real-Time Translation Over Skype 169
Z80xxc! (1111479) writes "Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
The german translation was really bad (Score:5, Informative)
German native here. I think this is just a marketing stunt. The german translation was so bad that it most of the time didnt make sense.
Also the german voice tried to simplify the text as much as possible to give a more or less understandable english version.
Real time translation has a looong way to go. At the moment it is as usable as google translate for chinese web-sites.