Baidu Shows Off Its Instant Pocket Translator (technologyreview.com) 43
MIT Technology Review: Baidu showed off the speed of its pocket translator for the first time in the United States during an afternoon presentation at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco. The Chinese Internet giant has made significant strides improving machine language translation since 2015, using an advanced form of artificial intelligence known as deep learning, said Hua Wu, the company's chief scientist focused on natural-language processing. On stage, the Internet-connected device was able to almost instantly translate a short conversation between Wu and senior editor Will Knight. It easily rendered Knight's questions -- including "Where can I buy this device?" and "When will machines replace humans?" -- into Mandarin, and relayed Wu's responses in clear, if machine-inflected, English.
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From which language was your comment translated?
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I hate it when people say "internet connected" instead of using it's proper name: IoT-linked SaaS big-data cloud-hosted service.
S.O.S. (Score:3, Funny)
Will this be able to translate "help me get out of this pre-nup and I'll give up the butt" from Slovenian to English? Asking for a friend.
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Impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's not scripted, then this is very impressive. He should have tried "Could you tell me more about what happened on Tiananmen Square?", though.
Re: Impressive (Score:1)
"President for life Xi is very well thank you."
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That one is easy: Just give the Mandarin for "Stay in place, the police will arrive shortly."
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That would have been pretty pointless as he had not gotten any meaningful answer.
Google Translate (Score:3)
By a strange coincidence, I discovered that Google Translate app on Android has this feature. It sucks and I failed to make it work, but it's there, unmistakably for the subject purpose.
Three* Words... (Score:2)
Digital Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook
* Actually four.
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Digital Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook
* Actually four.
My hovercraft is full of eels
nail simple dictation first (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now voice recognition can't even accurately capture what I say, not a fucking hope it'll also be able to translate it to another language.
Example - the above sentence captured using MS speech recognition:
By now voice recognition come even actually capture what I say was that England can also be able to translate into another language
..and in Google Docs:
Right Now voice recognition can't even accurately capture what I say and I f****** hope it also go to translate it to another language
(yeah, Google add the *s)
Google's getting close, although it struggles a lot more at times, but even that is going to sound garbled as fuck when translated - and that's with a quality microphone and a silent room, no background noise, no other people speaking, no traffic, no shitty phone microphone.
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Software to wreck a nice beach...
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We've been failing at speech recognition so long, maybe it's time to re-train humans to speak in a non-ambiguous language designed with clear sounds that machines can better understand.
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We've been failing at speech recognition so long, maybe it's time to re-train humans to speak in a non-ambiguous language designed with clear sounds that machines can better understand.
Good luck with that; we could call it something like "Esperanto" ...
Esperanto (Score:2)
We've been failing at speech recognition so long, maybe it's time to re-train humans to speak in a non-ambiguous language designed with clear sounds that machines can better understand.
Good luck with that; we could call it something like "Esperanto" ...
I completed the Duolingo Esperanto course in less than 2 months. I'm not fluent- but know enough that I'm reading a novel written completely in Esperanto now. Took two months before I started reading my first book. Show me any other language which is possible to casually learn in 2 months.
There is no reason why schools couldn't teach one year of Esperanto and have the whole world communicating effectively. (now, I'm sure it's easier to learn Esperanto if you're coming from a European language because al
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Took two months before I started reading my first book. Show me any other language which is possible to casually learn in 2 months.
For only speaking and reading: Japanese or Thai.
China even has all it's official news translated into Esperanto
Interesting, I did not do any Esperanto since about 30 years, but that would be a nice reason to refresh it.
tests show knowing Esperanto halves the time it takes to learn additional new languages- which is the real reason I learnt it in the first place.
European langua
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Took two months before I started reading my first book. Show me any other language which is possible to casually learn in 2 months.
For only speaking and reading: Japanese or Thai.
China even has all it's official news translated into Esperanto
Interesting, I did not do any Esperanto since about 30 years, but that would be a nice reason to refresh it.
tests show knowing Esperanto halves the time it takes to learn additional new languages- which is the real reason I learnt it in the first place. ...
European languages
I've heard elsewhere that Japanese is an easy language to learn. I might put that on my list to consider next. I'm refreshing my German, and about to start Spanish, but once I've completed my Spanish course I might pick up Japanese.
Obviously Esperanto helps you learn European languages more than it helps you learn other language families; and I've not seen any studies on it's use for learning non-European languages, but I suspect it probably would help. If for no other reason of confidence. I think peo
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The asian languages I'm somewhat familiar with have super simple grammar:
- fixed structure of the sentence
- no gender (no different suffix for a female or male thing, like in spanish or german)
- not many tenses, usually only present and past (past is used for future, too, but implying a date or 'tomorrow' it is the futur tense)
- no flexion for accusative or nominative or genitive, just a particle (help word)
- often no distinction regarding plural or singular (both for verbs or nouns)
The killer are the writi
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Yeah, I'm so sorry that translation software is very weak at interpreting gibberish.
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I've usually had pretty good accuracy, going all the way back to Dragon Dictate circa 2000 (condenser microphone, silent room).
When I've bothered to use it, Google voice recognition on my phone has been just fine in ambient conditions.
Many my enunciation hits the sweet spot for these models. Large swaths of Canada required a trained ear (or at least an attentive ear) to distinguish from Received SoCal Hollywood. (So much so that it's some strange accent from the Ottawa valley that became the national stere
Does it look like a fish? (Score:2)
When they make it look like a small fish that you can stick in your ear, it'll sell like crazy.
When they make one that can translate a teenager, I'll be truly impressed. I suppose they could analyze the speech patterns and use that to decide what they actually mean when they use a term like "literally". Still, listening to two teenage girls talk when no adult is in the conversation is like comparing math to accounting. They both use a lot of the same terms, but they have completely different meanings.
But
Dialects / patois (Score:1)