Microsoft shows almost instant translation from English to Chinese

Pictured: Spock with Universal Translator, Star Trek TV series

A real demonstration of the possibility of voice translation from one language to another just during a conversation with a delay of just about a second was shown by Microsoft Reasearch research unit manager Rick Rashid at Microsoft Research Asia's 21st Century Computing event in China.

In a rather long video (see from 7:12) Resid argues on the possibilities of automatic translation in various languages: it can be seen that his English words are perfectly recognized and presented on one of the screens and, finally, when the speaker pronounces the phrase “ I'm After some delay, you can clearly hear the synthesized Chinese speech. In this case, obviously, the applause in the hall refers to the correctness of the translation.


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Instant simultaneous translation systems are made by many companies, including Google and Apple, however, in this case, the emphasis is placed on the universality of the system and high-quality translation. The technological basis for such a translation is a system based on the use of the learning neural network. At the same time, Resid honestly says that the efficiency and accuracy of the system is still far from perfect, although the improvement in word recognition has increased by 30% from previous versions of it. If earlier on 4-5 correctly recognized words there was one mistake, now this indicator has grown to 7-8 words.

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