Microsoft researchers demonstrate software that translates spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly, while preserving the unique cadence of the speaker's voice.

Back in March when I started writing this blog and in one of my first posts, I drew parallels between recent developments by Google in machine translation and the universal translator technology depicted on the science fiction TV series Star Trek.

Well now Microsoft is making news with the development of new real-time language translation software that has also generated similar comparisons to the futuristic space age device. And some have even referred to the new software as “incredible,” “a breakthrough,” and a “translation tool that works like a human brain.”

The first public demonstration of the new software was recently made by Rick Rashid, Microsoft's chief research officer, on October 25 at an event in Tianjin, China.

“I'm speaking in English and you'll hear my words in Chinese in my own voice,” Rashid told the audience. The application works by recognizing a person's words, quickly converting the text into properly ordered Chinese sentences, and then handing those over to speech synthesis software that has been trained to replicate the speaker's voice.

"The results are still not perfect, and there is still much work to be done, but the technology is very promising, and we hope that in a few years we will have systems that can completely break down language barriers," Rashid wrote on Microsoft's blog.

"We may not have to wait until the 22nd century for a usable equivalent of Star Trek's universal translator, and we can also hope that as barriers to understanding language are removed, barriers to understanding each other might also be removed," said Rashid.

The cheers from the crowd of 2000 mostly Chinese students, and the commentary that’s grown on China’s social media forums ever since, suggests a growing community of budding computer scientists who feel the same way, added Rashid.

So is all the hype true? Is the new software as promising as they say it is? Check out the video presentation by Microsoft to find out.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation Inc.

See Also

• A universal translator would in all likelihood make use of cutting edge machine translation software
  Raw machine translation, otherwise known as automated or automatic language translation, may only be sufficient for communicating via social networks and video sharing sites, or for getting the gist of a foreign language website.
• Watch: Microsoft?s Star Trek Universal Translator ? Would It Have Downsides? By Matt Peckham
  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.
• Next at Microsoft
  Microsoft Research shows a promising new breakthrough in speech translation technology.