Star Trek Style Language Translator Arrives 100 Years Early Courtesy of Microsoft
Fans of Star Trek will be familiar with the translator, a small handheld device which can perfectly translate between TV American English to TV alien and back. This is actually a computationally very difficult task and Star Trek has been set in the 22nd century, which seemed a reasonably distant time away at the time, to achieve this feat. However, courtesy of research done by Microsoft researchers Frank Soong and Rick Rashid, a similar device actually exists today. The machine, will translate from spoken English to any of 26 different languages, such as Spanish and Mandarin. Amazingly though, it speaks the translation in the user’s voice in the foreign language, but without the crude, disjointed computer generated sounding words that today’s systems deliver. No, this actually delivers smoothly flowing words in the target language! It just needs about an hour’s training time beforehand with the user, to work this magic. Sadly, there’s no word if it can translate to Alien, yet. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Mr Soong shares the same surname as the fictional Dr Soong that invented the android, Data, in Star Trek.
Mr Soong said, “We will be able to do quite a few scenario applications. For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we’ll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output in a different language, but still in his own voice.”
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