Microsoft Star Trek translator not far off, In an impressive presentation Microsoft have shown off technology that came straight from the Star Trek universe with a translator that seemingly trumps Apple’s Siri.
The venue was the  14th annual Computing in the 21st Century Conference in Tianjin, China. On october 25th Microsoft head of research Rick Rashid addressed a crown of 2,000, mostly students.

In the presentation Rick spoke as the technology translated his speach into text on a screen above his head. He talked about the troubles of translation and how much the technology has come along. The technology did extremely well with few mistakes. It’s estimated that Microsoft’s new tech has around a 15% fail rate, compared to the previous 25% of other systems such as Siri and Xbox Kinnect’s speech recognition.

Then came the magical part.

Rick spoke in English, the technology live translated his speech to Chinese text, and then with very little delay it spoke the words and to boot it spoke in a voice similar to his!

The technology used about an hour of his voice as a base and voices of many Chinese speakers to create the audio translations. I don’t speak Chinese but whoops and enthusiastic clapping from the crowd suggests it worked really

I was very impressed with the presentation but would love to see it with a person speaking Chinese and an audio translation in English so I can hear how it comes out! Rick said a lot of work needs to be done so it’s not quite up to Star Trek translator level yet but it sure is getting close!

Does think kind of break through is exciting and will be better for the world or will it just be used for bad things by the corps