Microsoft Translator is a robust tool that offers translations for over 60 languages and most recently added Bangla. While text translation is a given, the service only supports speech translation for a subset of the 60 languages. Today, Japanese has been added to the list and becomes the tenth supported speech translation language.
You can imagine that this is no simple task. Microsoft has a breakdown of how this technology works and, although this is nothing new for the firm, it is still quite a marvel to see how it works.
- The sound is transcribed into text through the speech recognition AI
- TrueText then processes this text to remove unnecessary speech elements, such as redundant words or fillers like “um” (English) or “eto” (Japanese), that would generate poor translations
- The machine translation AI then translates each word using the context of the full sentence
- Finally, the text to speech generates the audio output from this translated text
As mentioned previously, Microsoft Translator can also tackle speech translation for nine other languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. If you'd like to try it out, you can find the app available for Windows, Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire devices. The service is also available in Skype and the Translator 10 Beta app.
Source: Microsoft
