Today in Redmond, Microsoft Research demoed the Translating Telephone. It does exactly what it says it does, and as you can see – well, hear – from this video, it was awesome.
Imagine a VOIP system that caches all your calls, converting them to searchable, storable, everlasting text. That’s already pretty amazing – especially if you already jump through hoops recording interviews and conference calls. But then imagine this: It can translate whatever you say into some other language. In real time.
As you will notice in the video, the research team built the proof-of-concept system to work in English and German, the native languages of Kit and Frank, the two developers on the team. As you also might have picked up, it has the same occasional clumsiness of an internet-based text translator. This is because it’s using the same technology that Bing’s translator uses.
What was funny for the researchers to discover was how their own spoken language differed from their written one. For extra monitoring of translation quality, they set up their test system so that it would re-translate the translated speech, so English-to-German-to-English. I myself envisioned a great moment in modern poetry, a la Jimmy James’ Super Karate Monkey Death Car, but as you can see, when chit-chat becomes fast and casual, it’s usually more like garbage in/garbage out:
What’s great is that a software tool like this could be stuck into so many different situations, as a live translation feature for video chat, as a conference-call option, or – in the least likely but sweetest scenario – as a feature on a Microsoft-branded Google Talk competitor that ran on Windows phones. Alas, that is probably not gonna happen. [Microsoft Research - no specific project page]
Justin
Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 1:53 AMBefore everybody in the translation industry worries this might put them out of business – let’s all just remember that the only reason “fruit flies like a banana” doesn’t come out as something to do with “flying fruit”, with most automated translation tools – isn’t because the tech has improved but because that specific phrase has been catered for.
We have a while before the Turing test in AI will be comprehensively beaten – until that time, my guess is that machine translation will remain rather poor quality – certainly not usable for anything important!
As if to illustrate this point I tried using Google Translate to convert the opening paragraph in this comment, into German. Then I translated back into English and got:
“Above all in the translation industry worry that they might put out of business – let us all just remind you that the only reason “fruit flies like a banana” not as something to do with “flying fruit come”, with most automated Translation tools – is not that because the technology has improved, but because the specific rate was provided.”
OK it’s not 100% rubbish certainly better than a few years ago. But, would you want to use sort of quality for anything remotely important? At best Microsoft and Google’s efforts will be for basic info only – just getting the gist of something.
When the problems of machine translation are properly solved – not only will translators go out of business but also we’ll start having to seriously worry about machines taking over the world!
JS