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Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Microsoft Research1 HN recommenders · 2013–2024
1M views · demo · dated · Uploaded 2012-11-08

Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition and translation system, built on deep neural networks, that turns his spoken English into Chinese speech in 2012.

HN cites it as an early impressive real-time speech translation demo, often in discussions of voice-preserving translation and later AI demos.

Computer vision, speech & NLPMachine learning & deep learning

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4 comments from Hacker News

@taliesinb2013 · in “If Steve Ballmer Ran Apple”

Wasn't MSRA behind that amazing live English-to-Chinese translator [0]? It's interesting to contrast Google's and Microsoft's approach with ours at Wolfram Research (at 0.3% their size, of course [1]). We've come to see that it is very fruitful to live in a murky space somewhere between "commercial product" and "research project". I'm thinking specifically about Wolfram|Alpha. It's an enormous and daunting project. We've tackled a lot of very hard problems, and obviously have a long way still to go. It has the weird property of being a thing that ships every week, but not one that the parent company depends on financially. And so we kind of do our own thing, encoding domain knowledge, adding content, curating data, and designing frameworks, even if some if it won't ever make us any money (e.g. who will ever pay for dog vision [2]). We mostly just do things because they're cool or fun. But it's been incredibly useful to drive innovation elsewhere in the company. For example: 1. Alpha's unit system (the best in the world, the authors claim) is already in Mathematica 9. 2. Alpha is inspiring us to bring high-level semantic data and reasoning to Mathematica 10. 3. The automatic analysis in Pro is being souped up and will form part of Mathematica's predictive interface (automatic suggestions to "perform logistic regression", and so on). 4. We're working on taking the natural language understanding frameworks we've built for Alpha and using them to translate natural language querie

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@istorical2014 · in “Say Hello to Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri Equivalent”

They've been doing some really cool stuff for a long time. Check out this real-time translation of spoken English into written and spoken Chinese (in the same voice of the speaker): [VIDEO]

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@rlu2014 · in “Microsoft demos breakthrough in real-time translated conversations”

Reminds me of this from a few years ago: [VIDEO] I feel like they should merge the two. The subtitles are a nice touch, but if it could capture the voice of the speaker it would be truly magical.

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@Mystery-Machine2024 · in “GPT-4o”

Have you seen this video from Microsoft, uploaded to YT in 2012, the actual video could be even older: [VIDEO]

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