Windows 10: Microsoft Translator Windows 10 app does not detect speech from microphone

Alexandis · May 13, 2023

I'm using notebook with internal microphone. The microphone does work - Sound recorder app confirms this. Also Windows recognition works properly. However, when I speak through this microphone inside Microsoft Translator app - it does not detect my speech. Permission to microphone is given, FYI.I have not found "Microsoft Translator" topic - for this reason I had to select something else "Microsoft Store" seemed the most relevant, since I've downloaded the app from Microsoft Store.

:)

Brink · May 13, 2023

Microsoft Translator brings end-to-end speech translation

Today, we released a new version of Microsoft Translator API that adds real-time speech-to-speech (and speech to text) translation capabilities to the existing text translation API. Powered by Microsoft's state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies, this capability has been available to millions of users of Skype for over a year, and to iOS and Android users of the Microsoft Translator apps since late 2015. Now, businesses will be able to add these speech translation capabilities to their applications or services and offer more natural and effective user experiences to their customers and staff.

Speech translation is available for eight languages — Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Translation to text is available in all of Microsoft Translator's 50+ supported languages. Translation to spoken audio is available in 18 supported languages.

This new version of Microsoft Translator is the first end-to-end speech translation solution optimized for real-life conversations (vs. simple human to machine commands) available on the market. Before today, speech translation solutions needed to be cobbled together from a number of different APIs (speech recognition, translation, and speech synthesis), were not optimized for conversational speech or designed to work with each other. Now, end users and businesses alike can remove language barriers with the integration of speech translation in their familiar apps and services.

How can my business use speech translation technology?

Speech translation can be used in a variety of person-to-person, group or human-to-machine scenarios. Person-to-person scenarios may include one-way translation such as personal translation, subtitling, or remote or in-person multi-lingual communications similar to what is currently found in Skype Translator or the Microsoft Translator apps for iOS and Android. Group scenarios could include real-time presentations such as event keynotes, webcasts and university classes, or gatherings such as in —person meetings or online gaming chatrooms. Human-to-machine scenarios could include business intelligence scenarios (such as the analysis or customer calls logs) or AI interactions.

We are just starting to scratch the surface of the scenarios where this technology will help and, as it is machine learning based, its quality and therefore applicability will improve with time as more people and companies are using it.

If you are at the Build Conference in San Francisco tomorrow (Thursday, March 31st) be sure to check out the presentation by Harry Shum, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Technology and Research, to learn more about this new capability and see live demos of apps created by Microsoft Translator partner companies.

How does speech translation work?

Speech-to-speech translation is a very complex challenge. It uses the latest AI technologies, such as deep neural networks for speech recognition and text translation. There is no other fully-integrated speech translation solution available on the market today and delivering a platform that would support real-life speech translation scenarios required going beyond simply stitching together existing speech recognition and text translation technologies. There are four stages to speech translation to be able to deliver this experience:

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) — A deep neural network trained on thousands of hours of audio analyzes incoming speech. This model is trained on human-to-human interactions rather than human-to-machine commands, producing speech recognition that is optimized for normal conversations.

TrueText — A Microsoft Research innovation, TrueText takes the literal text and transforms it to more closely reflect user intent. It achieves this by removing speech disfluencies, such as “um”s and “ah”s, as well as stutters and repetitions. The text is also made more readable and translatable by adding sentence breaks, proper punctuation and capitalization. (see picture below)

Translation — The text is translated into any of the 50+ languages supported by Microsoft Translator. The eight speech languages have been further optimized for conversations by training on millions of words of conversational data using deep neural networks powered language models.

Text to Speech — If the target language is one of the eighteen speech languages supported, the text is converted into speech output using speech synthesis. This stage is omitted in speech-to-text translation scenarios such as video subtitling.

How do I get started?

It's easy to get started with the new Microsoft Translator Speech API. A free 2 hour trial is available at aka.ms/TranslatorADMSpeech. You can test out setup and implementation in a virtual environment as well as read the API documentation on our new Swagger page. You can also find example apps and other useful information on GitHub.
Of course, if you have questions, issues, or feedback, we'd love to hear it! You can let us know on our feedback and support forum.

Learn More

What is automatic translation?

Microsoft Translator home

Microsoft Translator apps

Microsoft Translator FAQ

Click to expand...

Source: Microsoft Translator brings end-to-end speech translation to everyone with the world’s first Speech Translation API - Microsoft Translator Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Aditya_Roy · May 13, 2023

setting up microphone for speech recognition

Hi,

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

We understand your concern as you are trying to setup speech recognition on the PC.
In order to get clarity and to assist you accordingly, please reply with the answers to the questions below.

What is the Windows 10 version and Build installed? (Type
winver in Windows search/Run command)

When you say that “the box is grey and unresponsive”, where you are seeing this option?

Are you able to connect the microphone to the PC? (Does it show in Device Manager)

Meanwhile we would suggest you to perform these steps and check if you are able to setup the microphone.

Steps to set up a microphone: Before you set up Speech Recognition, make sure you've plugged the microphone into your PC so the following steps work.

Press Windows + Q or click on the Windows Search.

Enter Set up a microphone in the search box, and then tap or click
Set up a microphone.

Follow the instructions on the screen.

Once you are able to setup the microphone and then check if it’s working.

You may also refer this article for additional help: Use voice recognition
in Windows 10

If you are facing issues configuring microphone on your computer, I would suggest you to refer:

Fix microphone problems

Let us know how it goes.

Aditya Roy

Microsoft Community – Moderator

Brink · May 13, 2023

Microsoft Translator launching Neural Network based translations

Microsoft Translator is now powering all speech translation through state-of-the-art neural networks.
All speech translation apps that use this service, such as Skype Translator and the Microsoft Translator app for mobile devices, are now using neural network technology. Furthermore, the technology is available to all developers and end-users who want to use the Microsoft Translator speech API to integrate the technology into their favorite apps and services.

In addition to the nine languages supported by the Microsoft Translator speech API, namely Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, neural networks also power Japanese text translations. These ten languages together represent more than 80% of the translations performed daily by Microsoft Translator.

Neural network technology has been used for the last few years in many artificial intelligence scenarios, such as speech and image processing. Many of these capabilities are available through Microsoft Cognitive services. Neural networks are making in-roads into the machine translation industry, providing major advances in translation quality over the existing industry-standard Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) technology. Because of how the technology functions, neural networks better capture the context of full sentences before translating them, providing much higher quality and more human-sounding output.

Try and compare neural network translations at https://translator.microsoft.com/neural
Even though Microsoft’s use of neural networks for speech and text translation is still at an early stage, it is producing superior translations to what SMT provides. As with any new technology (we’re in the so-called ascent phase of the s-curve), we know the quality improvements neural networks provide today are only a first step towards future improvements. You can learn more about neural network-powered translation here.

By leveraging the scale and power of Microsoft’s AI supercomputer and the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, the team was able to release ten languages simultaneously; additional languages will be supported over time.
The ten languages are in production today, and available for users for translated Skype calls, for Windows desktop and the Skype Preview app for Windows 10, and in the conversation feature of the Microsoft Translator app for iOS and Android.

Anyone can directly try and compare the improved quality of these new neural network models by testing translations at https://translator.microsoft.com/neural.

In addition, for developers and enterprise customers of the Microsoft Translator API, the deployment into production of these new models comes as Microsoft Translator becomes available for test and purchase on the Azure portal. To get started with the Microsoft Translator API using your Azure subscription, click here. If you are already a Microsoft Translator subscriber and want to learn how to move your subscription to Azure, click here. Neural network-powered translation is available for developers using both the speech and text APIs:

All speech API calls are neural network-powered beginning today.

Text API calls using the “generalnn” standard category are powered by neural networks for translations between the above 10 languages. Learn more about standard categories here.

Click to expand...

Source: Microsoft Translator launching Neural Network based translations for all its speech languages Translator

Windows 10: Microsoft Translator Windows 10 app does not detect speech from microphone

Microsoft Translator Windows 10 app does not detect speech from microphone

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