Skype now translates in real-time into seven languages Microsoft has delivered its promised real time translation service in Skype. Redmond's VoIP service can now comprehend Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish and convert one to another as you chat. With one caveat: it's on Windows only for now, although Microsoft promises more languages and …
Microsoft have been working on getting this good enough for day to day use for many years:
See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rek3jjbYRLo
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFe7xVHMl_s
Anyone who uses voicemails in Exchange (which have automatic transcription) will know how good Microsoft already are at recognising speech.
I'm wondering how quickly it will dissolve into gibberish if, on translation, you repeat the translated phrase back at it.
Translation is hard, but it's good to see the real-time translation services spring up. It would be nice if it also transcribes both sides so that the speaker/listener can highlight to the other party when it goes awry (and even give feedback to the backend how well it's doing).
No idea, but I'd be mildly worried if I willingly permit an untrusted party to do on my messages what ECHELON is doing for phone calls.
This is where the real problem lies: integrating something like that is yet another route by which your communication will get tapped "for your benefit". Sure, the motives may be proper (umm, it's Microsoft, let's park that one) but it is virtually impossible to guarantee that this data stream is protected properly from, umm, "enthusiastic sharing" with 3rd parties that have no business seeing this data.
If I take the natural habits of Win 10 in mind and how hard they are trying to con people into installing that I think I'm justified in having my reservations about this.
There's no reason to think it would be any better than Bing's translations. Even ignoring the difficulty of flawless speech to text conversion (something even us meatbags aren't perfect at despite decades of practice in our mother tongue) once it has the 'text' if Skype was better at translation than Bing they'd update Bing's algorithms to use Skype's. Or vice versa if Bing was better.
So try Bing (or Google) and discover how easy it is to get funny or just plain bad results, and assume Skype will be the same. Put in a sentence, get the translation, put that translation in going the other direction and see if you can still recognize as meaning the same as your original sentence.
That doesn't make it useless, if I needed to call someone in Italy who I knew spoke no English, and he knew I spoke no Italian, Skype translation would probably work well enough for simple tasks like booking a villa or something. If my translation said "I would like to book your horse" or "I would like to ride your villa" he'd know something is amiss and after a few laughs and phrasing the requests differently I'd get my meaning across.
It wouldn't do for negotiating an important business deal, but that's not what it is intended for. Maybe in 10 or 15 years it will be useful for that, too.
...that is the main reason for auto translation, right?
Or maybe something that international dating agencies could make good use of?
Or useful for offshore call centers selling fixes for all those terrible trojans on your computer. There is no need for your employees to even speak the language of the person they are helping scamming any more.
I wonder how good the translation will be with more obscure languages further down the line ?
(Jump to 57s for the good bit if you're impatient)
At one time I used Skype a lot to speak with family and friends, but then Microsoft took over and thoroughly broke it. Now it needs constant updates to work at all, and I can never call anyone or receive calls using Skype because it no longer rings or beeps for incoming calls or messages on Android or iOS for any of us. Skype ignores questions about this issue this in their support forums, apparently thinking that the solution is for everyone to use Windows phones. Pretty much everyone in my circle has moved on to other apps like WhatsApp. Most of them no longer have Skype installed.
Whilst this sounds like a very cool technological advancement I just can't get my head around why anyone would be using it?
How often would you need to phone someone and speak to them if neither of you have a common tongue. International business is pretty much done in English and how likely are you to want to do business with someone who doesn't understand you? How many of your skype, or email contacts don't speak English (at all) and of those one how much actual benefit will you get from real time Skype translation over cut and paste Google Translate via email?
If you're not using Skype to talk, then i can only think that you're using Skype for cam sex and in those kind of situations if you're talking you're clearly doing it wrong!
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