![]() ![]() With practice I could probably learn Skype Translator’s “rhythm” in the same way, which could make the audio experience less distracting. “Even with human translators, you need to learn when to pause to let the interpreter absorb what you just said and repeat it,” says Vikram Dendi, strategy director at Microsoft Research. This is something we humans sometimes find challenging, too. Skype Translator is also deaf to the rhythms of normal spoken conversation, so you can’t be quite sure when its disembodied robot voice is going to break in and start blurting out its translated version. “If software is translating between American and British English, and it recognizes the word ‘football,’ it also needs to know when to change it to ‘soccer’ and when to keep it as ‘football’ or ‘gridiron,’” says Christopher Manning, a professor of linguistics and computer science in Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group. Determining which meaning of a word is appropriate in different contexts can be vexing. The limitations of Skype’s translation software are also revealing, since they show how difficult it is for even the smartest machine to mimic the subtleties of effective human conversation. Some of these disfluencies made it through during my conversation, but the translation still occurred with impressive speed and accuracy. Microsoft’s software tries to filter out “disfluencies” (such as “um,” “ah,” and repetitions) on the word and sentence level. As more people use the software, this system should become more effective at recognizing idiosyncrasies of accent and cadence, potentially making Skype Translator-and Skype itself-more useful. ![]() Deep learning lets Microsoft’s computers reliably transform a stream of audio speech into chunks of text, which can then be analyzed using standard translation methods.
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