Machine translation is the holy grail of computing becoming what we want it to be. The ability to understand human speech and related area of machine translation, has taken major strides as of late. Driven by the requirement of the Internet, there is significant work being performed to improve accuracy. Google has made major strides as of late, using the billions of keywords used to search as likely sequences of what people may be saying. For example, New York Pizza is a more likely sequence than Florida Pizza. Being able to guess better when recognition is borderline significantly improves final accuracy. The large data set here helps companies like Google and Microsoft to advance the science.
An interesting aspect of this technology is voice morphing where we can generate speech that impersonate different people's voices. Imagine being able to dub foreign movies but the voices sounding the same as if the actual actor spoke the words in the foreign language.
There is new advancements in all of these areas from Microsoft which has always had a strong research group here (Bill Gates was a huge believer in importance of this area). Here is a nice video outlining how they have both improved the accuracy using modelling of the human brain and then translating what is said to Madnarin as if the native English speaker was speaking that language. The presentation is by Rich Rashid who is the VP in charge of MSR (Microsoft Research). One of the nicest people you will ever meet. And the person behind Mach version of Unix which got adopted by Steve Jobs to be the OS for NexT computers which in turn became the OS for MacOS!
The punch line is at the end so be sure to watch the whole thing.
An interesting aspect of this technology is voice morphing where we can generate speech that impersonate different people's voices. Imagine being able to dub foreign movies but the voices sounding the same as if the actual actor spoke the words in the foreign language.
There is new advancements in all of these areas from Microsoft which has always had a strong research group here (Bill Gates was a huge believer in importance of this area). Here is a nice video outlining how they have both improved the accuracy using modelling of the human brain and then translating what is said to Madnarin as if the native English speaker was speaking that language. The presentation is by Rich Rashid who is the VP in charge of MSR (Microsoft Research). One of the nicest people you will ever meet. And the person behind Mach version of Unix which got adopted by Steve Jobs to be the OS for NexT computers which in turn became the OS for MacOS!
The punch line is at the end so be sure to watch the whole thing.
