Software Translates Your Voice into Another Language

I thought this was interesting. This software not only translates words, but also reproduces your speech patterns.

Research software from Microsoft synthesizes speech in a foreign language, but in a voice that sounds like yours.

Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers.

Soong says that this approach can convert between any pair of 26 languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Italian.

"The word is just one part of what a person is saying," he says, and to truly convey all the information in a person's speech, translation systems will need to be able to preserve voices and much more. "Preserving voice, preserving intonation, those things matter, and this project clearly knows that," says Narayanan. "Our systems need to capture the expression a person is trying to convey, who they are, and how they're saying it."

There's an audio demo on the page that shows translation from English to Spanish, Italian and Mandarin.

technologyreview.com

The Universal translator is born!

Looking forward to the dog, cat, and Klingon language add-ons.

It'll require a huge amount of fixing and debugging though.
Like say for Spanish, one word can mean 2 words. Going
from a simple "A" to a "E" could change the word/sentence
entirely. It'll have to pay attention and recognize every
syllable, eee, ooo, and ah to be even remotely good.
Good technology though, good to see we're making progress.

Although I would like to see the Zero-point
energy device that Microsofts controllers
are black-listing. But a boy can dream
can't he?

reply to post by N3k9Ni


This is a fantastic device that should help out in the longrun. Visualize a throat type necklace attachment light in weight that can adjust vocal outputs like in DUNE nice find OP

Finally I wondered how long it would take after the advent of smart phones, for a universal translator would come along. They should make this an app for phones, so we all have a mobile translator in our pocket.