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Comments: 133 +- Apple: Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed For iPhone on Thursday October 29, @06:57AM
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by
samzenpus
on Thursday October 29, @06:57AM
from the we-got-a-word-for-that dept.
from the we-got-a-word-for-that dept.
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Ponca City, We love you writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. 'Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server,' says Waibel. Waibel is a leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. 'Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants,' says Waibel. 'But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.'"
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Testing the Hungarian version (Score:5, Funny)
My nipples explode with delight !
Re:Testing the Hungarian version (Score:5, Funny)
That's alright, I just want to see how well it translates "Dear Aunt, Let’s set so double the killer delete select all."
Parent
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Exactly!!!!! I think Cervantes said it best: "My hovercraft is full of eels"
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Now if they'd only release it for Android we could be on our way to a proper protocol droid! [wikia.com]
Re:Testing the Hungarian version (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Speak simply (Score:4, Insightful)
Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation.
I think that should be corrected to "Users speak simply...". When using Google Translate to translate something from Dutch to French or German, I often deliberately make simple sentences that I know can be parsed easily and without having to detect double meanings.
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
Yeah yeah I should be more positive...
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, have you seen Google Voice's attempted transcripts of voicemails? Things that I think are pretty clear come out in very, very odd ways.
Not that Google is the best at everything, but they usually do quite a bit better than average. I find it hard to believe someone has managed to best them at both of these technologies and their first attempt to market it is an iPhone app.
Parent
Re:Speak simply (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that Google is the best at everything, but they usually do quite a bit better than average. I find it hard to believe someone has managed to best them at both of these technologies and their first attempt to market it is an iPhone app.
Not that I want to be called a nitpicker, but do you have any evidence? Does your average scale by market-value?
Parent
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Microsoft's Speech to Text software built into every laptop nowadays does a better job of Google Voice's transcripts, but mostly because Microsoft's version has you read a short article, sentence by sentence, to determine any accents, slurs, or otherwise imperfections in your speech to properly align the computer to your voice.
The problem lies in determining the actual message - just like throwing something a google or babblefish text-to-text translator, the message may come out a little backwards, or broke
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http://isl.ira.uka.de/about_us/interact_director/ [ira.uka.de]
Sounds like this guy is "quite a bit better than average" when it comes to speech technologies too. I don't see what's so hard to believe, it's a lot more handy having something like this on your phone than it would be on a desktop or even a laptop.
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Speech recognition and natural language processing are very specialized fields. Just having a bunch of very smart software engineers (as Google does) will only get you so far without the specialized domain knowledge and domain-specific experience. Presumably Google has a few speech and natural language experts, but it's only these few that any more specialized competitor needs to best - not the whole of Google.
AFAIK Google's current translation approach is mostly a dumb brute force approach of replacing the
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
The device receives verbal cues that are missing from translating text to another language. In fact, there is far more information available, and perhaps it is possible to get clues about which version of a word is desired (or which of several similar-sounding words) from tone shift.
Parent
Re:Speak simply (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
The device receives verbal cues that are missing from translating text to another language. In fact, there is far more information available, and perhaps it is possible to get clues about which version of a word is desired (or which of several similar-sounding words) from tone shift.
In theory, yes. (That's why our brains get more info from a spoken sentence than a written one.) In practice, not a chance in hell. Not until the state of the art advances by several breakthroughs.
Disclaimer: I am a computational linguist.
Parent
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Funny)
But are you cunning?
Parent
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Google translate is a cheesy free tool that does not compare with professional translation tools. Last time I checked, the state of the art was to obtain documents written in multiple languages, and train a neural network (or something similar) based on those manual translations. It's orders of magnitude better than Google translate.
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Which is the best translation software in your opinion?
Are there any books which point to the state of art translation algorithms and how it is implemented?
I have searched for translation theory a lot, but google mostly returns with human translation theory rather than the algorithms behind it.
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Speak simply (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess state-of-the-art is still far from perfect too. The GP's point still stands.
Parent
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The state-of-the-art is crap, but it's still the state-of-the-art. In any case, that's what is currently best, for a value of best meaning "gets the best score in most MT evaluations when used competently". Moses is a bunch of code implementing fun statistical algorithms though, not a full translation system. The quality of the system you get depends on the quality of the training you do, and pretty much how you setup the system together. The guy was asking for the algorithms though :-)
OG
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It manages to map your incorrect French phrases into incorrect English with similar errors. I'm really impressed by the software...
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I tried "je n'aime pas du chocolat" and got "I do not like chocolate". It manages to map your incorrect French phrases into incorrect English with similar errors. I'm really impressed by the software...
Just in case you were not being sarcastic, your own sentence is grammatically incorrect. The correct sentence is indeed "Je n'aime pas le chocolat".
(I am a native French speaker.)
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Funny)
(I am a native French speaker.)
Well, in that case you may not entirely understand English. Perhaps you really are not chocolate, have you checked lately?
Parent
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Thank you very much.
Would you be able to point me to any books for translation algorithms and mechanisms?
I have been reading the clbook (for computational linguistics, rather than translation).
Are there any books for translation algorithms?
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I'm have trouble understand. Your battery need charge? I have jumper in chest of car.
Re:Speak simply (Score:4, Insightful)
I do a lot of language translation, and it's pretty obvious to me that it requires understanding. Good automated translation is holodeck territory.
Parent
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Yes and no, while most speech engines are shit, there's actually a lot more information in voice than in text... You can use intonation to figure out which of the double meanings was meant.
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I'm sorry, are you flirting with me?
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I think that should be corrected to "Users speak simply...". When using Google Translate to translate something from Dutch to French or German, I often deliberately make simple sentences that I know can be parsed easily and without having to detect double meanings.
You mean sort of like when you are talking to somebody in another language that you haven't mastered? You will often need to use simpler sentences and enunciate clearly when speaking across cultural lines. this just allows you to speak those words in your own tongue. Pretty impressive, imho.
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Yep... using simple sentences is a must. Simple in every way : short, simple sentence structure, unambiguous vocabulary, etc, etc. However, even when doing this it can be a crap shoot whether the output is any good.
I use Google translate quite a lot for eBay transactions, and I've found the only way to get decent output is by iterative trial. Start with something simple as you suggest, but then translate it first to the target language and back into English to see how good it is (of course it may be the tra
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They say it is mainly trained for tourists or medical dialogues
Well, that kind of supports my point that it will best work with simple input.
$ARTICLE $NOUN $VERB [ $ADVERB ]
On Other Phones (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't see a general speech-to-speech translator here. The closest I can get is the "Speereo Voice Translator" which is simply an audio phrasebook, not a speech-to-speech translator like Jibbigo claims to be.
Vamos! (Score:5, Funny)
oblig Futurama quote (Score:5, Funny)
Where do I put the fish again? (Score:5, Funny)
Parece que he perdido mi copia de la guía, pero como yo soy un príncipe de Nigeria, con mucho gusto a comprar uno por $ 10 millones de dólares EE.UU., si usted me ayudará a transferir fondos de mi hermano, que ha robado mi difunto padre trono. Por favor, responda con su información bancaria para que podamos ayudarnos mutuamente.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is concerned, because I destroyed my copy of the directive, to the transference but, because they are natural of the prince of Niger, happy, to buy for $ 10 million dollars the United States if you help me, of the Kapitaln, which eliminates of my brother, of that with túnica the recent mine father' Therefore we of S. Répondez with their information of the battery can help to request the throne?
I wonder if widespread automatic translation... (Score:2)
... will drive evolution of all languages toward vocabulary and syntax that's less prone to embarrassing or dangerous misinterpretation?
I used to wonder if voice recognition would drive a big shift in pronunciation patterns, but now I expect that automatic voice recognition will outstrip human voice recognition before that can happen. Maybe the same thing will happen with translation, too.
mcipod (Score:2, Insightful)
Hilarious (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A suggestion (Score:4, Informative)
Watch the video. The app has two "textboxes" corresponding to the two languages, and a record button underneath each. After you record the message, the interpreted text shows up in the top, and the translated text in the bottom, followed by a robotic reading of the translation. So yes, it shows the English phrase, and if the video is real then this technology shows some real promise.
Parent
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Download it from the App Store and see for yourself... http://jibbigo.com/ [jibbigo.com]
Admittedly it's a $25 app, so maybe wait for a review. But this isn't vaporware. They actually released the app for public use and it's gotten 4 stars from buyers so far.
Re:Why 6,000 languages? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
No, no, you've got it all wrong... (Score:3, Funny)
When everyone can just speak English?
See, this kind of Anglo-centric thinking gets us nowhere. We can't get everyone in the world to agree to adopt English as their preferred natural language... It'd never work, there would be too much resistance. People don't want to give up their native tongues to speak English.
No. Clearly the way to go is to get everyone to speak Esperanto.
Re:No, no, you've got it all wrong... (Score:4, Funny)
Until we all spreak Esperanto, I would hope that it contains an American to British English translator too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IX6K77zHwg [youtube.com]
(Not the Chaser's best, but will do.)
Parent
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When everyone can just speak English?
Ok, which kind of English would you pick? Canadian? Australian? Caribbean? Ghanaese? Indian? Scots? Or one of the countless creole dialects and pidgins? It is one of the few languages that has never been officially reformed or standardized, so it is essentially... multiple languages. Exactly what you criticised.
Languages evolve to reflect the mindset of their speakers. Even if one had the means to eradicate all languages except some form of Standard English, it would instantly break up into ca. 6000 branche
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Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces.
Is Waibel also "an leader" in grammar detection?
Yes. Whenever you use their translator it will detect your grammar for you.
In early versions they had a voice message that would play: "Waibel translator has detected grammar in your sentence!" after every time you said something. After a while they decided to remove it - I'm not sure why.