Skype Translator learns how to speak using social media

When Microsoft and Skype revealed Skype Translator in May, everyone displayed awe and wonder at a service that could finally traverse the language barrier. The premise was that the Skype Translator app would convert speech in real time allowing fluid conversation between speaking partners with different lingual tongues. Accomplishing something so monumental is, in itself, a massive challenge. However, there’s another layer to this science fiction babel fish, and that’s learning the differences between writing and speaking.

Think you have trouble deciphering social media slang? Try translating it. Microsoft researchers have been studying how to translate social media, and in their efforts they came across a way to teach the company’s upcoming Skype Translator how to speak more like us. Some researchers think social media could be key to getting computers to better understand humans. Social media experiments are “important examples of a new line of research in computational social science, showing that subtle social meaning can be automatically extracted from speech and text in a complex natural task,” says Dan Jurafsky, an expert in computational linguistics at Stanford, who recently led work on teaching computers about human interactions by listening to speed dating. The Skype Translator app, set for beta release later this year, translates multilingual conversations over the service as they’re happening. In May, Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Skype and Lync at Microsoft, and a German-speaking colleague demoed the app at the Code Conference, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. As Pall spoke in English, both German and English subtitles scrolled along the bottom of the screen while real-time audio translation accompanied the subtitles.