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.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.If both sides were speaking in real world settings the demo would have been honest but far less impressive to casual watchers.Despite this misdirection I am still impressed with the amount it did manage to translate from the long, naturally-spoken English sentences.