Looks like now its time to ditch Siri, the lady in apple devices ( iPhones to be specific ) who responds and entertains you. Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.
On Tuesday Feb 12th 2012, Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, says a long sentence in English, and then has it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can have a look at the demo here
In order for the translation system to do its work it needs about an hour of training, which allows it to create a model of your voice. Then the created model is being integrated into Microsoft’s Text-To-Speech model for the targets translation language.
Once the training period is out of the way, there’s no reason that translation couldn’t be performed in real time on a smartphone, or near-real-time if you outsourced the work to a cloud computer cluster, like Microsoft Azure. One of the more impressive aspects of the software is how it uses the speaker’s original voice in its translations, which it can pick up after the user spends just an hour with it.
Shrikanth Narayanan, a professor at the University of Southern California, explains why that is important:
Once it comes to use for practical purposes, imagine how easy it becomes to date someone who doesn’t speak your language or get that business deal done with a foreigner
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