Microsoft puts up Skype Translator for public review

Microsoft has unveiled Skype Translator, its real-time translation service for voice calls and online chats, The Register reported.

"We've invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they're emerging as important components in this more personal computing era," Microsoft corporate VP Gurdeep Pall wrote in a blog post.

The system was first unveiled in a conference in May, when the company said it hoped to launch a public beta later in the year.

The service was now available to people who signed up for the preview programme, and at launch it supported 40 instant messaging languages and two spoken ones: English and Spanish.

According to Microsoft, it was sticking with those two languages for now in order to give the machine learning algorithms that powered the service time to work out the intricacies of human speech patterns – for which, the early sign-ups would act as guinea pigs.

The long term goal, according to Pall was for Skype to be able to auto-translate "as many languages as possible."

To demonstrate the state of the art of the tech, Microsoft published a video showing two groups of elementary school students – one from an English-speaking school in Washington State and the other from a Spanish-speaking school in Mexico City – communicating via the preview version of the tool.

According to a technical blog post, the system was devised by teams from Microsoft's Skype division and Microsoft Research, which was responsible for the deep neural network technology at the heart of the translation engine.

The service combined the language knowledge of Bing Translator with special routines designed work around "disfluencies" in speech – such as when speakers rephrased their thoughts mid-sentence or padded out their sentences with filler sounds like "um" and "ah."

According to Microsoft, Skype Translator was a great example of the company's investment in research, which in this case was a decade of committing resources to the advancement of speech recognition, automatic translation, and machine learning technologies, Venture Beat reported.

As Skype Translator relied on machine learning, the more the technology was used, the more it improved. Skype was thus expecting the quality of the English and Spanish translation to continually advance as more people used the Skype Translator preview with these languages.

The company today also shared the details about how Skype Translator worked in a blog post, along with an infographic. The team explained the testing process in a video, including that it captured all audio snippets anonymously for analysis.