Microsoft Translator: Breaking language barriers and developing new opportunities for global communication

Olivier Fontana, Microsoft translator Product strategy director

The world is getting smaller, global collaboration, common innovation has become the norm. At Microsoft Research, we are particularly sympathetic to this – from Beijing to Redmond, Cambridge to Bangalore, and borderless communication and collaboration across the globe is a key foundation for our scientific collaboration and product innovation. Global integration brings the development opportunities to everyone, and to help people across the globe to cross language barriers, to achieve efficient communication and extensive collaboration, we bring Microsoft Translator.

Microsoft Translator is Microsoft's automated translation service based on cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, big data, natural language and cloud computing, and is one of the earliest and most widely used applications in Microsoft's many artificial intelligence research efforts. Microsoft Translator now supports text translation in over 50 languages, real-time voice translation in 8 languages, and speech recognition and output in 18 languages. At the end of July 2016, on the basis of Chinese simplified and traditional, we have recently added Cantonese text translation to further improve the support of Chinese application environment.

Intelligent translation of self-learning

"Statistical machine translation" is the main technology behind Microsoft Translator, which is based on Microsoft's more than 10 years of research in the field of natural language, adding the principles of statistics and machine learning. To put it simply, the translation system transforms "translation" into a machine learning topic, which allows the computer to judge and learn the results of artificial translation and language conversion in training data continuously, and promote the self-improvement and optimization of the system algorithm in the continuous correction and correction. Through statistical modeling techniques and efficient algorithms, continuous learning of optimized machine translation systems can be used to match the most appropriate translation results based on contextual contexts rather than the meaning of words and stiff grammatical rules.

To say that Microsoft Translator's intelligence comes from machine learning, natural language and other technologies, and its reliable operation and continuous optimization, it is inseparable from the Microsoft in various areas of resource advantage. For example, as a cloud service, Microsoft Translator runs on the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform, which provides a running platform for advanced analytics such as machine learning, as well as high availability and data security as a SaaS cloud service. And it can stretch the scale of operations as needed. On the other hand, the global Bing search engine also provides Microsoft translator with a global scale of language materials and learning materials that enable machine learning systems to grow and evolve.

At the same time, Microsoft Translator offers a wide variety of products and services for Microsoft. Since 2006, Microsoft Translator has gradually started to provide automated text translation capabilities for a growing number of Microsoft products, such as office, Bing search, ie and Edge browser, Skype, Microsoft Cortana (Cortana), and more. Maybe you're not aware of it, but it's always around you--tap the "Review" menu item in the Word interface of your computer, and then choose the "Translate" icon, and you'll get a glimpse of Microsoft translator.

Intelligent Voice translation that allows you to communicate naturally

At the Build2016 Microsoft Developer Conference, held at the end of March 2016, Microsoft CEO Satia Nadra pointed to the future of Microsoft and the IT industry: to allow human natural language to interact with advanced machine intelligence, namely, "dialogue as a platform" (conversation as a Platform) ", and released the Microsoft Robotics Framework (Microsoft Bot framework) and Microsoft Cognitive Services (Microsoft Cognitive Service) to help developers build a new generation of AI applications. In fact, as an AI service that can speak multiple languages, Microsoft translator has already achieved successful practice in the field of voice translation services.

Microsoft Cognitive Services

As early as 2014, Microsoft translator introduced the Voice translation service, and March 2016 opened the API for voice translation for developers. Currently, Microsoft Translator supports real-time voice translation in 8 languages including Mandarin (English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese). You can experience this private real-time interpretation service in Skype Translator and Microsoft translator Apps for Windows, iOS, or Android.

Voice translation is much more complex than text translation and requires four steps of automatic speech recognition (ASR), Truetext Smart text correction, automatic text translation, and text-to-speech (TTS).

Among them, automatic speech recognition with deep neural network, the thousands of-hour audio data of different languages to analyze and learn, in order to achieve "understand" human natural voice of the purpose-based on machine learning, the effect of speech recognition will continue to improve with the accumulation of data. Truetext Smart Text Correction is responsible for people's oral communication into the normative text, for example, remove "ah", "ah", "This", "the" and other such as the fat words and repetition, stuttering and other faulty wordings, and add segmentation, punctuation, so that the text closer to the user's original intention, but also easier to read and translate. The enhanced speech translation engine, based on text translation, adds more spoken text corpora, thus building a better model for oral conversation class translation. Finally, the text-to-speech conversion process, if the target language of the translation is one of the 18 conversion languages currently supported by Microsoft Translator, then it is possible to use speech synthesis technology to convert translated text to voice playback. In the process of speech translation, the introduction of Deep Neural Network (DNNS) technology greatly reduces the error rate of translation and improves the reliability.

Take your personal translation and get on with the world

To make it easier for more users to use translation services anytime, anywhere, Microsoft translator launches mobile apps for different platforms. Not only for Windows devices, this app also supports devices that use iOS, Android platforms, and even Apple Watch and Android Wear smart watches.

The Microsoft Translator, which runs on the smart terminal, continues to evolve and grow so mature that it not only supports translation capabilities in many languages, but also offers offline translation options. The user can either enter or paste text with the keyboard, or use the microphone to input the voice directly, or the foreign text to be seen to capture, so that the software automatically recognize and translate. In the latest version, we've also added real-time voice translation in 8 languages, allowing two of people with no language to communicate in real-time with a single phone.

Microsoft Translator mobile app is definitely a must-have for overseas travel, it can not only help me to ask the way, but also by taking pictures to identify streets, shops and no picture of the menu, and even let me and all corners's new friends to have a really meaningful conversation, really appreciate the cosmopolitan communication.

The increasingly popular "sea" in China is another useful translator for Microsoft. The Microsoft Translator Technology-based Bing Translation (Bing.com/translator) provides online text translation and website translation capabilities, so you can translate your entire Web page by typing in your Web site, and also support over 50 languages Make your overseas shopping a barrier free. Windows 10 users can translate entire pages or text in one click by adding the translator extension of the Edge browser.

In your most familiar, there is also the figure of Microsoft translator. Simply select "Translate" in the dialogue screen by long-clicking on text such as French, Japanese or Arabic that appears in the dialogue bubble, and the Chinese translation from Microsoft Translator will appear.

Should the enterprise be internationalized or localized? We can all help.

In the global market integration today, Microsoft Translator in the business sector and the enterprise Market application prospects are becoming clearer. Whether it is overseas enterprises to expand the localization of Chinese market transformation, or Chinese enterprises to the sea development of "go out" strategy, we can help.

Microsoft Translator provides text and voice translation services that help multinational companies achieve barrier-free internal communication and in-house training, provide customer support for global markets, build online communities, and deliver real-time, bidirectional or multi-directional translations of websites, documentation, and business intelligence. Microsoft Translator, which emerged as a cloud service, offers cost-per-demand, low-cost, customizable cross-platform development and access capabilities that ensure compliance with enterprise IT security policies and provide the industry's only translation corpus that supports industry-specific users, compared to traditional localization. At present, Microsoft Translator has been serving thousands of enterprise customers worldwide, including Amazon, EBay, Twitter, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and so on, in their respective business globalization, localization of the field has been the help of Microsoft translator.

In your most familiar, there is also the figure of Microsoft translator. Simply select "Translate" in the dialogue screen by long-clicking on text such as French, Japanese or Arabic that appears in the dialogue bubble, and the Chinese translation from Microsoft Translator will appear.

Should the enterprise be internationalized or localized? We can all help.

In the global market integration today, Microsoft Translator in the business sector and the enterprise Market application prospects are becoming clearer. Whether it is overseas enterprises to expand the localization of Chinese market transformation, or Chinese enterprises to the sea development of "go out" strategy, we can help.

Microsoft Translator provides text and voice translation services that help multinational companies achieve barrier-free internal communication and in-house training, provide customer support for global markets, build online communities, and deliver real-time, bidirectional or multi-directional translations of websites, documentation, and business intelligence. Microsoft Translator, which emerged as a cloud service, offers cost-per-demand, low-cost, customizable cross-platform development and access capabilities that ensure compliance with enterprise IT security policies and provide the industry's only translation corpus that supports industry-specific users, compared to traditional localization. At present, Microsoft Translator has been serving thousands of enterprise customers worldwide, including Amazon, EBay, Twitter, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and so on, in their respective business globalization, localization of the field has been the help of Microsoft translator.

At the WPC 2016 Microsoft Partner Conference, which just ended in July, Microsoft announced that it would provide Skype meeting Broadcast services for Office 365 enterprise users by the end of the year, automatically adding subtitles to web meetings and translating them into different languages in real time. -This is also implemented based on Microsoft translator.

Open APIs bring open development opportunities

Today's Microsoft is a productivity and platform company, and we are committed to creating innovative platforms that help partners and ecosystems to grow together. Microsoft Translator has also created opportunities for innovation in the field of smart text and voice translation, which has broad prospects for applications.

In fact, since 2011, Microsoft Translator has opened up APIs and provided cloud access services to third parties in the form of an Azure Cloud Platform SaaS Service. Currently, thousands of customers worldwide are using this service for typical applications such as website localization, multilingual customer support, e-commerce, social media, online gaming, and business intelligence. The Microsoft Translator API makes it easy for cross-platform access to third-party systems and applications, and developers only need to register on the Azure Data Market website (datamarket.azure.com/browse/data), Get a free translation service of 2 million characters per month.

Microsoft's mission is to empower everyone and every organization in the world to succeed. We want Microsoft Translator to provide services to consumers through Microsoft's products, and to empower more developers and businesses to provide a wide range of translation services to more users around the world, breaking the barriers between languages and promoting communication and communication with people all over the world.

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Microsoft Translator: Breaking language barriers and developing new opportunities for global communication