Microsoft Star Trek Translator Not Far Off---Microsoft: Star Trek's universal translator not that far off: Microsoft may have co-opted Star Trek a full century early by demonstrating an honest-to-goodness universal translator — one that not only renders what you’re saying into another language in real time, but that manages to sound like you while doing so.
In fact, assuming everything really is as it appears in the video above, Microsoft just pulled off something pretty amazing — much more impactful, in theory anyway, than a mere voice recognition app like Apple’s Siri.
This Star Trek-esque universal translator is far from a commercial project and will likely not make its way into any real product for decades, maybe longer. Still, that’s not the point. As you watch the video, you’ll see that the text translation of everything the Microsoft Researcher says tags along (a little slowly) afterward.
Is it a perfect voice recognition system yet? No. For the most part, the English-to-English text on the board was pretty close 70% or higher. That’s not bad considering he was just talking like normal.
We might have these kind of technologies available commercially right now, but we often have to baby them and talk to them like “a computer” instead of a more natural flow like you’d have when talking to another person.
The big “WOW” factor comes when he starts speaking and the software starts translating it into Chinese. Not only was it equally as quick at recognizing the spoken words, but it provided the option to “speak” the Chinese translation back to the audience and in a similar style and sound to the speaker’s own voice.
In fact, assuming everything really is as it appears in the video above, Microsoft just pulled off something pretty amazing — much more impactful, in theory anyway, than a mere voice recognition app like Apple’s Siri.
This Star Trek-esque universal translator is far from a commercial project and will likely not make its way into any real product for decades, maybe longer. Still, that’s not the point. As you watch the video, you’ll see that the text translation of everything the Microsoft Researcher says tags along (a little slowly) afterward.
Is it a perfect voice recognition system yet? No. For the most part, the English-to-English text on the board was pretty close 70% or higher. That’s not bad considering he was just talking like normal.
We might have these kind of technologies available commercially right now, but we often have to baby them and talk to them like “a computer” instead of a more natural flow like you’d have when talking to another person.
The big “WOW” factor comes when he starts speaking and the software starts translating it into Chinese. Not only was it equally as quick at recognizing the spoken words, but it provided the option to “speak” the Chinese translation back to the audience and in a similar style and sound to the speaker’s own voice.
