Microsoft's translating telephone

Microsoft has developed a translating-phone that combines speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech technology allowing two people of different languages to carry on a phone conversation. Check out the video below…it seems we have a really useful device from Microsoft!

This VoIP program combines three Microsoft technologies–speech recognition, translation, and text to speech–to create a speech to speech and text to speech translator that’s surprisingly accurate.

The translator automatically trains itself to recognize the voice, is approximately 80% accurate. But in the translation demo we watched between a native English speaker and a native German speaker, the system was accurate enough to be almost entirely understandable–and that was with two people speaking quickly in a crowded room.

One of the keys to making this work is that the transcription text is displayed simultaneously to both users. If something isn’t quite right, they can straighten things out in a hurry by slow repetition of the troublesome passages.

This revolutionary technology could make communication easier across the globe especially for business purposes like a conference call or live video chats.