Microsoft’s Skype Translator is about to get a wider audience.
The translation feature of Microsoft’s video and voice chat service, available until now only for users of the Windows 8.1 operating system, will make its way starting Thursday to users of all Windows versions.
Skype Translator, first demonstrated at a conference last year, offers real-time translation of conversations into a handful of languages. Currently, that’s English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish.
Others are coming, said Olivier Fontana, a director of product marketing with Microsoft Research who’s working on the translator project.
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The service isn’t designed to replace professional translation, he said. Rather, it aims to bridge a language barrier that used to make things like changing a hotel reservation in a foreign language difficult.
“We’re not trying to compete with Ferrari,” he said. “We’re trying to bring a [Volkswagen] Beetle to people who are walking today.”
The next step, Fontana said, is to build the feature into other versions of Skype, including those for other desktop operating systems or mobile phones, though he didn’t indicate which was likely to come first. Fontana also didn’t say when Skype Translator might be included in Microsoft’s Skype for Business, which is sold to business customers.
Microsoft executives have touted the service as an example of better collaboration within a company with a reputation for infighting. The voice-recognition technology comes from Microsoft Research, which collaborated with the Skype team and the group within the Windows organization that builds the Cortana voice-activated digital assistant.
The technology is built on algorithms designed to learn based on speech. The tool starts with the smarts of Microsoft’s existing text-translation dictionary and is fed information on how people actually speak. That includes news broadcasts paired with closed captioning, purchased logs of customer support calls, and, ultimately, conversations Microsoft stages to teach the software. Data from actual users of preview versions helps, too.
“All we need is a sound and the transcript,” said Fontana. “The more data we get, the better it becomes.”
Some language tics, like adding “um,” or “right” at the end of a sentence, require linguists to step in and guide the software.
“It’s a combination of art and science,” Fontana said.
Date: October 1, 2015