Windows Translator app

As mentioned by Gurdeep Pall in this morning’s Big Blog post, today we have announced the first phase of the Skype Translator preview program which will kick-off with English and Spanish as the first two languages. We couldn’t be more excited; Skype Translator is the result of decades of research in speech recognition, automated translation, and general machine learning technologies, combined with an intense focus on the user experience. This next phase in the Skype Translator journey is an exciting milestone and we’re looking forward to sharing it with those who use Windows 8.1 and have signed-up for the Spanish language via the Skype Translator sign-up page.

Microsoft was one of the first to delve into the challenge of speech translation. Recent improvements in speech recognition, made possible by the introduction of deep neural networks combined with Microsoft’s proven statistical machine translation technology, allow for better translation outcomes, making meaningful one-on-one conversation possible. Skype is about helping people communicate – mind to mind, heart to heart. Skype Translator is the latest evolution of this.

The Skype Translator preview program is currently available for Spanish-speaking and English-speaking Skype customers who use Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 Technical Preview on their desktop or tablet. In addition, the app also translates text IM conversations between over 40 languages. The preview stage is critical to the development and advancement of Skype Translator as it allows customers to use the product and provide valuable feedback, which in turn will help us improve the product and consequently, help the technology get smarter and learn more languages.

How Skype Translator Works

Machine Learning is the capability of software learning from training data examples, and Skype Translator is built on a robust Machine Learning platform. By learning from the training data during this preview stage, along with all of its nuances, the software can learn to better recognize and translate the diversity of topics, accents and language variation of actual Skype Translator users.

Skype Translator’s machine learning protocols train and optimize speech recognition (SR) and automatic machine translation (MT) tasks, acting as the glue that holds these elements together. This “glue” transforms the recognized text to facilitate translation. This process includes the removal of disfluencies (i.e. ‘ahs’ and ‘umms’ as well as re-phrasings), division of the text into sentences, as well as addition of punctuation and capitalization.