With a new Translator Hub, Microsoft gives the power of language to developers

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Microsoft yesterday announced commercial availability of their Microsoft Translator Hub. The service has been designed to allow developers and business to deliver tailored, existent-time translation in up to 39 languages. The real-time translation is available as an Azure Marketplace application, enabling users to leverage the Microsoft Deject to evangelize more relevant machine translation applications to their customers.

The applications vary for this service but every bit an example, information technology will permit for fluid, real time translation of live web chat interactions from client services representatives. It goes beyond manifestly machine translation past allowing the output to exist fully optimised for that detail application. A private set of information can be uploaded and using the Translator'south automobile learning training system, output can then be tailored as required. Manipulating the output could let exclusion of business concern specific nomenclature such as names of products or abbreviations. These customised translation scenarios tin can then be tested deployed so that they suit each application for which they are targeted. Once the solution is deployed, it can accessed through the familiar Microsoft Translator Service API, all the time being kept private or shared, depending on what yous require.

How it all works

Many of yous may already be familiar with Microsoft's translation engine. Yous tin experience it though their Bing Translator Web page. Better withal if you are a Windows Phone user (that'due south why you're hither correct?) yous can but download their excellent Translator app that allows for online as well as offline translation. The app uses a compressed version of the Bing Translation engine in conjunction with linguistic communication packs to provide for offline translation. Currently it supports vi languages Chinese, English language, French, German, Italian and Castilian. It's well worth a try.

What Microsoft are doing here is allowing its users a flexible way to combine their own customised translation models (using the Microsoft Translator Hub) with the solid existing MS Translator API. This in turn will allow those that use the service to build and deploy highly scalable solutions to fit their own needs rather than utilising a less than flexible off the shelf solution.

Translator Hub Graphic

How does this stack up against Google's Translation offering?

Whilst Google offering a similar set of Translation services for automobile translation applications, they provide support for up to sixty+ languages, which is near double that of what Microsoft currently offers. Microsoft look to be offer users a way to leverage their machine learning engine to help customers maximise the relevance and accuracy of the translated output.

Providing the Translator Hub to users could just be compelling enough for its customers to choose Microsoft's cloud based service over that of Google's. Every bit the MS service is a linguistically informed statistical machine translation arrangement, I would expect that its machine learning would but get better the more than information technology is used. Perhaps Microsoft will, by proxy ameliorate its service merely by seeing how their Cloud based system adapts to the diverse custom data sets that volition be finding its way to them via the Translator Hub?

Machine Dreams

I of the things I find the most exciting with these cloud-based machine learning systems is the potential for improvement and progress for everyone. The collective input via millions of transactions of speech recognition and text translation queries via the web, combined with powerful machine learning, should lead to rapid improvements in the quality of results.

WP Central TellMe Conversations

I'd certainly similar to promise that this improved backend will benefit us directly with faster, more than accurate speech recognition technology. Microsoft take revealed a few teasers of their proposed improvements to the Tellme speech communication engine. Currently it is fairly limited merely its been demoed at the contempo the Windows Phone 8 acme engaged in what they phone call conversational querys. So there will actually be a two fashion interaction with the service, this will be made available to 3^rd party developers to ability their apps.

If you haven't tried Microsoft'due south Translator app for Windows Phone (it has augmented reality!) yous tin grab at that place hither in the Marketplace for free.

Source Microsoft via ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley

QR: MS Translator

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