Is Microsoft’s Universal Translator for Real? Joins Google and Apple with Instant Translator

November 4, 2014

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November 4, 2014 – In Star Trek it seemed all aliens could speak English. Of course that’s only because Star Trek had technology, the Universal Translator, that instantly understood alien languages and translated them into perfect English almost every time. It was invented on Earth in the year 2151 according to the Star Trek Wikia. You can see below an image of an early version of the translator in Captain James Kirk’s hand. Later on it shrinks to the size of a lapel pin.

Today we have Google Translate. I took the liberty of producing a sample of its capability in translating Russian to English below. This Russian headline from the BBC Russian news service when translated to English is not too bad. The Google Translate functionality also recognizing speech and the company plans to put the application on every Android smartphone.

Apple too offers Apalon Speak & Translate covering 36 languages for text-to-speech translation, 38 for voice-to-voice and 86 for text-to-text.

And now, not to be outdone, comes Microsoft, who through its 2011 Skype acquisition is about to launch Skype Translator. A beta release will be out before the end of 2014. For Skype’s 300 million current users this should prove to be an exciting development.

Using neural networking technology the application delivers real-time speech recognition translation, just like Google and Apple. Watch a demonstration. The translation isn’t instantaneous but it is amazingly accurate.

How do deep neural networks work in relationship to language learning? The neural network architecture contains a language model that understands the nuances of natural language from parts of speech to semantics to idiomatic expressions. Its learning is semi-supervised, that is, language is broken down into an architecture that allows the software to learn automatically on its own. It compares tens of thousands of words common in multiple languages and compiles them in a huge database. It applies the rules governing syntax and semantics to words as spoken and extracts accurate meaning from one language to translate it into print and synthetic speech on the receiving end. You can register for the Skype Translator and preview it but the preview release will only operate on Windows 8.1 devices and above.

So another barrier to the 22nd to 24th century world of Star Trek is about to fall – a universal translator but only for Earth languages. Since we have yet to meet our first intelligent Romulan or Klingon-speaking outworlder we cannot deliver on instant translation of habitable exoplanet civilizations. Nevertheless, it’s pretty neat.