Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
My current client is specialising in speech recognition, speech synthesis and automatic translation. They have something similar, focused on enterprise customers. I find this subject very interesting.<p>I am a Ruby guy and I only marginally get in contact with their C++ code, but from what I learned so far this stuff is extremely memory and CPU hungry. It also depends on having been fed the right amounts of input. That's why Google Translate is so good. They have tons and tons of data from all the websites they parse, and in many cases the content can be obtained in different languages. Corporate pages are often translated paragraph by paragraph by humans which results in perfect raw data to train these algorithms. Also for example all documents that the European Parliament produces are translated into the languages of all member states.<p>Everything that has to do with translation has to do with context. I think the software right now is as smart as a six year old kid, except that it has a much bigger vocabulary. But if you say "The process has stalled. Let's kill it." it probably only makes sense if you know you are talking about computers.<p>It's hard to imagine that computers one day might really understand everything we say. But just by using Google Translate I think they really might. Это является удивительным. (I don't speak Russian. I hope I didn't insult anyone now. ;))