Posted on 05/28/2014 2:26:33 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Skype hopes to make its international connections easier — though perhaps still a little awkward — with a new feature that automatically translates conversations almost in real time.
Parent company Microsoft unveiled the new technology at the Code technology conference on Tuesday, where Skype vice president Gurdeep Pall made small talk in English with a German-speaking Skype manager in Europe.
After saying a sentence in English, an automated voice translated his words into German. (You can watch the video here.)
It’s not quite the real-time universal translator that characters on “Star Trek” used to speak to alien life forms. And inevitably for a technology built on the still-tenuous foundations of speech recognition and machine translation, it’s not 100% accurate.
Pall’s demonstration with his colleague ended with this awkward exchange at the very end:
Pall: “So what brings you to the United States, in addition to of course helping me with this demo?”
“I have many meetings with my colleagues in Redmond and I take the opportunity to see her fiancé my.”
Pall, after a pause replied: “That’s nice!”
German-speaking members of the audience were said to have thought the translation was “not so good” but generally understood the essence of it.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
/johnny
Obama: After the election, I’ll have more flexibility.
Russian translation: I’m a fairy who bends over and takes it like Gumby.
I only speak two languages. English and profanity.
Can it translate Australian? :)
True ‘real time’ is impossible. For instance, in English, the verb is usually near the beginning of the sentence. In German, the verb is usually near the end of the sentence. In translating from German to English, the translation must wait until the verb is spoken in order to make a translation.
Maybe it can speak 'San Franciscan'......
It can translate Windows 8 sucks in 6,500 spoken languages
There are many good and salutary uses for language. The most important thing one could ever convey through that vessel is forgiveness, but that seems to be the farthest from anyone’s mind.
Just put this fish in your ear first....
Couple of Fosters and I can handle that for ya, mate.
The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes like this:
`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, "Well, That about Wraps It Up for God."
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
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