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Microsoft has a new translation technology that increases accuracy with help from your voice.
Discussed yesterday in a blog post by Microsoft chief research officer Rick Rashid, the company's translation technology is capable of taking a user's spoken English word and then translating that into Mandarin Chinese. The kicker is that the Chinese translation is pumped through speakers in the user's own voice.
Microsoft's technology is based on a new translation technique called Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Rather than use the "hidden Markov modeling" technique, which is widely used and bases translation on training data from many speakers, DNN uses human brain behavior to develop better speech recognizers.
That advancement has helped Microsoft reduce translation error by over 30 percent, compared to the Markov method, according to Rashid. Whereas older models make errors once in every four or five words, DNN's error rate is one word out of seven or eight.
