Microsoft Research could hit a potential goldmine with one of their forays, that is being able to convert spoken English into Mandarin, taking all but a few seconds’ delay, now how about that? The good news, in essence, does not just stop there, as it is also able to output Mandarin speech in the vocal style of the original speaker, now how about that? This technology certainly wowed the crowd when it was recently demonstrated by Microsoft’s research chief Rick Rashid in Tjianjin, China, on October 25th, meaning such an achievement took its own sweet time to hit the major newswires.
Rick Rashid spoke eight English sentences into the lab’s new speech-recognition, translation and generation system, and all of it were converted/translated to Mandarin flawlessly, impressing a crowd that comprised of 2,000 students and academics. This was made possible thanks to different stages of the speech-to-speech process, where it involves the implementation of a novel neural networking (machine learning) system which effectively reduces word-recognition errors to one in seven or eight. This increases the chances of Bing Translate to create intelligible Mandarin text to feed into the speaking engine.
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