The computer program then showed text translations in real time as he spoke to the public. To top things off Rick Rashid also demonstrated how as he spoke in English the Computer spoke the same thing with his own voice just seconds later in Chinese.
Computer speech recognition is not really something new. It originally began developing in the 1950s as computer systems were programmed to understand spoken digits. In the 1960s IBM demonstrated how one of their machines can understand up to 16 English spoken words. Ever since, the way speech recognition works has been drastically changed and the fidelity of it has greatly improved. Nowadays we have software like Dragon Naturally Speaking from Nuance or Siri from Apple that have provided us with the latest technology used in voice recognition software.
A speech recognition system is far from perfect. Microsoft’s new system has managed to have a dramatically increased fidelity when compared to similar systems available on the market. Real time translation is possible and will soon be available to all of us. Google is also developing a live translator and has been working on it for some years. However, Microsoft’s translator is even more special then Google’s because it simulates your own voice instead of using a robotic voice when speaking translated text.
