Reason No. 2,347 why Microsoft is making the world more like Star Trek: its latest voice translation project.
In an astonishing video that's making its way around the web, the company's chief research officer Rick Rashid speaks before an audience in Tianjin, China, as a computer translator spits out his words in Mandarin — in his own voice.
If you're familiar with the United Federation of Planets, you'll know that Star Fleet officers spoke different languages than Klingons and Ferengi and Vulcans. Yet they all communicated seamlessly thanks to the real-time "universal translator" that enabled everyone to hear their native language no matter what dialect was being spoken.
"The results are still not perfect, and there is still much work to be done, but the technology is very promising," Rashid wrote in a blog post this week. "And we hope that in a few years we will have systems that can completely break down language barriers. In other words, we may not have to wait until the 22nd century for a usable equivalent of Star Trek's universal translator."
He added, "We can also hope that as barriers to understanding language are removed, barriers to understanding each other might also be removed."
This latest advance brings to mind another sci-fi quest on the part of the Redmond, Wash.-software giant: its patent for "immersive display experience." As anyone who's ever watched Cmdr. William T. Riker play Parrises squares on the USS Enterprise well knows, the Star Trek holodeck provides a three-dimensional virtual reality experience, projecting images and shapes that surround the user.
While playing on your local holodeck is many decades away, Rashid's translation technology is being perfected now. In a breakthrough technology that Microsoft Research devised in cooperation with the University of Toronto, the translator learns the nuances of an individual's speech and builds a profile.
Using that data, it combines with properties from native Chinese speakers. In the case of Rashid, the system's profile then took his words, found the Chinese equivalents and reordered them to be grammatically correct Chinese.
A video of Rashid's speech shows cheers from the crowd of mostly Chinese students.
Wrote Rashid, "The commentary that's grown on China's social media forums ever since suggests a growing community of budding computer scientists who feel the same way."
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