Let’s face it, unless you’ve learned another language growing up, learning a second language can be pretty difficult later in life. Thankfully the nimble minds at Microsoft know this and are currently underway developing software that would learn the sound of your voice, and translate it into another language.
According to a recent article in MIT’s Technology Review, Microsoft researchers are plugging away at new speech recognition technology that could one day allow travelers the ability to communicate in other languages they don’t speak fluently. Additionally, the software is being designed to help language tutoring software more user friendly.
So how does it work? According to the team’s research the program would operate in three steps: first the program would begin by recognizing your speech in whatever language you spoke in, second it would translate this speech, and finally, once translated, output the speech into another language. The program would even be able to retain your voice – meaning you wouldn’t sound like a traveling automaton.
According to Microsoft researchers the program is said to require about an hour of training, which when compared to the months, even years, it takes to master a language the traditional way is practically nothing. We imagine a program like this would have wide-ranging applications, least of which would make it easier to communicate among languages as well as begin to remove some of the existing language barriers through the use of advanced technology.
Currently, the program is able to convert between a total of 26 different languages including Spanish, Italian, English, and Mandarin Chinese. No word yet, though on when this technology will be available to consumers, but we imagine it will be later rather than sooner. Voice recognition programs can be pretty tricky – we all know how well Siri understands what we say – so although this will certainly prove revolutionary, we wont be throwing away our Rosetta Stone DVDs just yet.
Image credit: Shutterstock/Manfred Steinbach
My 2 year old Droid 2 does that NOW with Google Translate in conversation mode. Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel.
I don’t believe this will actually be a reliable way to communicate, at least not anytime soon. While the “with your own voice” is a cool gimmick, there are too many problems with this technology, its a combination of speech recognition, machine translation and robotic speech – three steps where something can fail. And you have no way of knowing if the person heard what you actually said!
That’s why I am building Babelverse, a global community of interpreters (both professionals and any multilingual speakers) that can provide translation remotely. We rely on people instead of machines, to preserve the quality, context, cultural relevance, tone and emotion of the spoken word.
Intrigued? http://babelverse.com
Don’t worry to spanish is no se preocupe. Not no pasa nada, which means nothing is happening. I would know
Thanks for the comment! From my experience with native speakers no pasa nada literally translates to “nothing is happening,” it is also used colloquially as “don’t worry.” But for the sake of being kosher I went ahead and changed it. Cheers!
And no se preocupe doesn’t have a [s] at the end
It’s either “no te preocupes” or “no se preocupe”
Star Trek’s Universal Translator?