Microsoft demos breakthrough in real-time translated conversations
Bilingual speaker here: the German translation produced was very poor quality compared to the English one; the German speaker was enunciating excessively clearly, sitting in a sound studio and sticking to short, simple phrases with clear grammar.<p>From that point of view the demo was misleading - we heard an English speaker talking naturally and heard clear responses, but the other side of the conversation was quite broken, although possible to understand.<p>If both sides were speaking in real world settings the demo would have been honest but far less impressive to casual watchers.<p>Despite this misdirection I am still impressed with the amount it did manage to translate from the long, naturally-spoken English sentences.