One of the things that always annoys us when we travel overseas is the language barrier. While there are some countries with a large, English speaking population, there’s still several countries around the world where foreigners struggle to communicate with the native population. Countries like China for example. Well, that may be soon the thing of the past, thanks to Microsoft who has posted a video online wherein they demonstrate their language translation prowess by translating real-time spoken English into Mandarin.
That’s not all. The speaker in the video – Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research – says that Microsoft can translate English into Mandarin, and speak it in the user’s own voice. That’s accomplished by feeding their translation machine an hours’ worth of spoken data, and the machine does the rest. It’s pretty cool and freaky. You can check-it out in the video below, and the fun starts at 5:30.
Source: TNW