Windows 10: You can now transcribe speech with Google Translate

Brink · Mar 17, 2020

Recently, I was at my friendâs family gathering, where her grandmother told a story from her childhood. I could see that she was excited to share it with everyone but there was a problemâshe told the story in Spanish, a language that I donât understand. I pulled out Google Translate to transcribe the speech as it was happening. As she was telling the story, the English translation appeared on my phone so that I could follow alongâit fostered a moment of understanding that would have otherwise been lost. And now anyone can do thisâstarting today, you can use the Google Translate Android app to transcribe foreign language speech as itâs happening.

Transcribe will be rolling out in the next few days with support for any combination of the following eight languages: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

To try the transcribe feature, go to your Translate app on Android, and make sure you have the latest updates from the Play store. Tap on the âTranscribeâ icon from the home screen and select the source and target languages from the language dropdown at the top. You can pause or restart transcription by tapping on the mic icon. You also can see the original transcript, change the text size or choose a dark theme in the settings menu.

On the left: redesigned home screen. On the right: how to change the settings for a comfortable read.

Weâll continue to make speech translations available in a variety of situations. Right now, the transcribe feature will work best in a quiet environment with one person speaking at a time. In other situations, the app will still do its best to provide the gist of what's being said. Conversation mode in the app will continue to help you to have a back and forth translated conversation with someone.

Try it out and give us feedback on how we can be better.
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Source: Now you can transcribe speech with Google Translate

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Brink · Mar 17, 2020

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

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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

Divya Murugan · Mar 17, 2020

WIn 10 and IE 11 Google translate reports translating site but nothing happens.

Hi John,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

I appreciate your interest in Windows 10. We sincerely regret for the inconvenience caused.

I suggest you to add the Google translate website in compatibility mode and check if it helps:

Follow the steps:

Open internet explorer.

Click on ALT key in key board.

Click on tools tab

Select compatibility view settings

Add the website

Click ok.

Hope this information helps. Post back with updated issue details for further help.

ArtKaufman · Mar 17, 2020

Transcribe text from recording

Is there a way to to a speech to text from a recording so that when finished it has essentially transcribed the recording? I tried to do it with windows speech recognition but do not think it really transcribes, only follows commands.

Windows 10: You can now transcribe speech with Google Translate

You can now transcribe speech with Google Translate

You can now transcribe speech with Google Translate

You can now transcribe speech with Google Translate

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