Today, Microsoft Translator announces the availability of its 10^th speech translation language: Japanese. This new language is now available across all Microsoft Translator supported technologies and products along with the already released nine other speech translation languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

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. It is one of the services in Microsoft’s portfolio of artificial intelligence technologies designed to make AI accessible to all.

Speech translation is a hard problem to solve, as is always the case when machines are trying to mimic a deeply human capability.  It uses two neural-network based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies: Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation. It also uses a unique natural language processing technology (TrueText) and a speech synthesizer, aka “Text to Speech”, which enables users to hear, and not only read, the translation.

These technologies are then connected to perform the speech translation function:

1. The sound is transcribed into text through the speech recognition AI
2. TrueText then processes this text to remove unnecessary speech elements, such as redundant words or fillers like “um” (English) or “eto” (Japanese), that would generate poor translations
3. The machine translation AI then translates each word using the context of the full sentence
4. Finally, the text to speech generates the audio output from this translated text

With this release, businesses, developers, and end users alike will be able to use Japanese in the various apps and services offered or powered by Microsoft Translator:

• For presentations, meetings or any other multi-devices translation use cases with the Microsoft Translator live feature. This personal universal translator feature is available at http://translate.it and on the Windows, Android,  iOS, and Amazon Fire Translator apps
• Microsoft Translator API for developers to add speech translation to their applications
• The Skype Translator feature in Skype for Windows desktop and the
  Windows 10 Skype Preview app to call between Skype clients or from Skype to any phone number in the world with a Skype Out subscription (available in the Skype Preview app only)

You can translate any of the supported 10 Translator speech languages into any of the supported 60+ Translator text languages.

In addition to the availability of Japanese as a speech translation language, starting today, all text translations from English to Japanese (and vice-versa) in Microsoft products and services will exclusively use these new and improved neural network translations system. Whether you translate a webpage in Edge, an email in Outlook, or a simple sentence on www.bing.com/translator, all of your translations will be performed with our state of the art neural network systems.

Read more about this news in our Microsoft Japan blog (in Japanese)

Learn More

• What is machine translation?
• Microsoft Translator Speech API
• Microsoft Translator apps
• Microsoft Translator FAQ
• Microsoft Cognitive Services

The post Japanese becomes the 10th speech translation language supported by Microsoft Translator appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

This release provides several key fixes as well as new and improved features including:

• Visual Studio Online builds
• Expanded import, export and recycling
• Improved translation and suggestion results
• As well as a number of key fixes

The MAT team really focused on key features as well as addressing both reported and non-reported issues in this release. A huge congratulations to the MAT team and their great work delivering this latest release!

Please note that due to updates to the setup process, you will need to perform a one-time uninstall of MAT v3.0 or earlier before installing v3.1.

Get Started Using MAT Today

• Multilingual App Toolkit Team Announcement 
• BUILD Conference Session
• Multilingual App Toolkit on Windows Dev Center
• How to Use the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Introduction to the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Build multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Test multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Localize multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Submitting your localized app to the Windows Store

The post Multilingual App Toolkit 3.1 Launched – Localize Your App, Extend Your Reach appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Using the plugin, visitors can translate a site into any of the 40+ supported languages in one click without leaving the page once this light-weight, cross-browser plugin is installed. This plugin also provides options for a setting a color scheme, as well as an option to allow visitors to suggest translations.

The Bing Translator plugin should be installed from within the WordPress Dashboard by clicking on Plugins >Add New and search for “Bing Translator” and works on any WordPress site. A site developer can also manually install the plugin by downloading it from WordPress.org, then adding the “bing-translator” folder in the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.

Using Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Video

More Links to Get Started

• Blog Post from Microsoft Open Technologies
• Translator Plugin Site on WordPress.org
• Installing & Configuring the Bing Translator for WordPress
• Using the Bing Translator for WordPress
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using WordPress Widgets
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using Shortcodes
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using PHP Template Tags

Congratulations to Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc team for their great work on the Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress! 

The post Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Enables Webmasters and Developers to Localize Site Content appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Advancements in technology to support and preserve languages create greater awareness of the linguistic and cultural traditions celebrated throughout the world, which in turn promote understanding, tolerance and dialogue. Helping to enable business, communities, and consumers to communicate and collaborate across language barriers through technology innovation is a core focus for the Microsoft Translator team.  

As part of that focus, Microsoft Translator is announcing Welsh as a new supported language in partnership with the National Assembly for Wales and leveraging the Microsoft Translator Hub. The Welsh language today becomes the latest to join a growing list of languages to benefit from translation services provided by Microsoft Translator.

In 2012, the National Assembly passed the Official Language Act into law, which placed a statutory duty on the Assembly Commission to treat both languages on the basis of equality. 

The Assembly’s Presiding Officer, Dame Rosemary Butler, said:  “One of my key roles is to ensure that all the people of Wales are able to engage with the Assembly’s work, whether through the Welsh or English language. That’s why we have been working with Microsoft to create an automatic language translation system to help the Assembly to meet our own language goals.”

Machine translation is a key part of the Assembly’s commitment to delivering a fully bilingual institution where businesses and services can be delivered through the Welsh and English languages. Users can now translate to and from Welsh using the breadth of Microsoft products including: Office, Bing Translator as well as in the Bing Translator applications for Windows Phone and Windows. 

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeHcZEd7VEo]

 In addition to backend service updates to the Microsoft Translator API, new updates have been released for Windows and Windows Phone Translator apps which include: 

• Offline Language Packs for Polish and Turkish
• Availability of Polish, Czech, Turkish, Greek and Hungarian in Camera Mode
• Addition of Welsh and Maltese in Keyboard Mode
• Release of Wide Tile for Windows Phone

 To further commemorate IMLD, the Microsoft Local Language Program, a part of Microsoft YouthSpark, announced the Language Toolbox, an additional resource to the Microsoft Language Portal (LLP), serving as a consolidated inventory of free language resources and tools provided by Microsoft to help bridge the gap between language and technology. You can read more about this new resource here. 

At Microsoft, we are excited that the continued advancements of machine translation features and functionality are enabling users to achieve a shared understanding and make the world a little smaller every day.

To Learn More 

• National Assembly for Wales Machine Translation Site 
• National Assembly for Wales Blog
• Video Blog from Presiding Officer Dame Rosemary Butler AM
• Video Blog from Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM and in Welsh
• Microsoft Citizenship Blog
• Language Portal Blog

The post Celebrating International Mother Language Day with the Launch of Welsh & New Features appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

The song translation app allows users to upload their favorite songs with lyrics, add timestamps to the lyrics, then translate and record the song in another language. Song Translator leverages the Translator Control while also leveraging other key Microsoft technologies and features including: Windows 8, Visual Studio, Background Task for live tiles, and Windows Azure Cloud Storage, as well as pitch synthesis from SonicAPI.

Built in Visual Studio 2012 with C# and XAML using the Windows 8 Store App template, the app calls the Translator API to process the translations into over 40 of the Translator supported languages.

Watch the Song Translator Demo from Michelle, Priya, and Kat

 [View:http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-91-16/3364.Song-Translator-Demo.mp4]

 How to Use the Song Translator

1. Download the app
2. Unzip the project
3. Install the Nuget package for the Mobile Service
4. Open the configurations file and input credentials

Check out the walk through guides written by our Interns to learn more.

• Using the Song Translator App
• Leveraging Azure Storage
• Using Background Tasks for Live Tiles
• Song Synthesis and SonicaAPI

To learn more about our talented group of summer interns and their experience, make sure to check out the Microsoft Research blog post.

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The post Summer Interns Singing a Happy Tune with Song Translator App appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

The Microsoft Translator and Bing Webmaster teams are announcing the new and improved Translator Widget. Built on the Microsoft Translator API the widget is a highly customizable and powerful translation tool you can place on your web page, instantly making the page available in 40+ languages. The redesigned widget provides a look and functionality best suited to today’s modern websites, while maintaining the features and functionality users love.

As part of Bing and Microsoft Research’s commitment to innovation in partnership with Intel, the next generation widget is powering the Tomorrow Project’s Future Powered by Fiction Contest web site. Real time translation by the Translator Widget empowers visitors to the site from across the globe to explore and share their creative vision for a better tomorrow.

As a free HTML/JavaScript app, the Translator Widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translation to any web site. Visitors can see your pages in their own language, without having to go to a separate translation web site. Visitors to your site can also help you enhance the translations on your website by suggesting better translations for specific sentences, and you may invite others to turn these suggestions into authoritative corrections for all visitors.

Webmasters, developers, bloggers, or anyone with a webpage will be able to leverage the widget to expand their audience. The best part is, you don’t have to write new code to leverage the Translator widget. If you can paste a small snippet of JavaScript into your page, you will be able to display the widget to your audience. No need to know programming intricacies, or how to call an API. No need to write or install server side plug-ins for your specific software. Just copy, paste, and enable your visitors to translate!

For more advanced users, go beyond the basic and leverage the customization capabilities to modify the widget look and feel to best complement your web site. Pick the colors that blend into your site design or the size that best fits into your layout. The widget’s adaptive positioning allows you to better uses real estate for wide layout designs.

Webmasters can also enable the collaborative translation framework (CTF) to harness the power of their user community to improve translations over time. When enabled, PC users simply hover over the text to have the tooltip display “Improve Translation” when CTF is turned on. Touch devices simply click on the translated sentence to display the tool tip in their native language.

Learn more about how you can leverage the widget on your site today, via the getting started guide links included below. If you are using the widget already, or are a webmaster looking to grow your user audience, check out the new widget and begin translating right away, there is no cost to it!

The Translator fully supports customized machine translation systems, using the Translator Hub.

Getting Started Guides:

• Getting Started with the Translator Widget
• Getting Started with the Translator Widget – Using Collaborative Translation
• Embed and Customize the Widget
• Advanced Customization of the Translator Widget
• FAQ

The post Announcing the Next Generation of the Bing Translator Widget – Powering the Tomorrow Project appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Thousands of developers are at BUILD 2013 in San Francisco this week where Microsoft is showcasing how they can create great experiences for their consumers on Windows platforms by utilizing these technologies in their own applications.

Today during Steven Guggenheimer’s keynote at BUILD, Microsoft showcased the availability of an exciting new update to Twitter for Windows Phone – bringing instant translation of Tweets that are in a different language than your own. Over the last year, Microsoft has been working with the team at Twitter to explore how its translation technology, based on Microsoft Research’s extensive advancements in machine learning, can help the global Twitter community better communicate across language barriers.

With this update, a soccer/football fan can still follow the news about their favorite soccer team even if the breaking news on Twitter is not in their language. Tapping on a Tweet with a globe icon, which indicates translation is available, expands the Tweet and shows translated text right below the original content. The built-in Tweet translation feature is available for the 38 languages supported by the app powered by Microsoft Translator. Download/update your Windows Phone Twitter app to try it out for yourself!

“Breaking down language barriers with world-class research and engineering has been the guiding principle behind the development of Microsoft Translator, and Twitter is an excellent new addition to community of customers and developers leveraging Microsoft’s translation technology for their users,” said Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research US. “The integration of machine translation technology from Microsoft Research has the ability to broaden any application’s impact through a substantial increase in accessibility to real time communications and information sharing. No longer is language a barrier to real time instant connections around the world.”

Windows Phone application developers can take advantage of the Microsoft Translator API to bring the power of instant translation to their apps. Windows developers can also download the just announced Translator control for Windows to reach a global audience and differentiate their Windows applications.

As the next billion users come online, we look forward to delivering and enabling many more global experiences by continuing to harness the innovations coming out of our research work and data platforms with developers, app builders and partners. 

The post From Tweet to Translate: Microsoft’s translation service powers new translation feature in Twitter for Windows Phone appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Today at BUILD, Microsoft announced the preview of the Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

With the Translator control developers get easy access to robust, cloud-based, automatic translation between more than 40 languages. The Translator control gives the Windows 8 developer access to machine translation services, which is built on over a decade of natural language research from Microsoft Research. After download and one-time authentication, you can simply place the Bing Translator control in your app, feed it a string to translate, and receive the translation. 

The Bing Translator control, powered by the flexible Microsoft Translator API puts the power of a world class machine translation system in your hands. Designed to enable a variety of scenarios, it is available in a number of developer friendly protocols.

The control takes the text you pass in to the Bing Translator web service for translation, and then passes the translation of the input back to you. Your application can handle the return text however you see fit. You receive the text to translate by any method, and render it by any means you choose-  using the Translator Control in the middle, in order to translate the input text to the target language.

Get started with the Translator Control today!

Download the Translator Control

Sign Up for the Translator Service

Get Samples and Documentation

The post Announcing Today at BUILD – Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

You can now download the free app from the Windows store here.

The Bing Translator app is based on years of Microsoft Research’s investments in advancing machine learning – a way to find patterns that humans can’t see, helping people interpret the words and worlds around them.

Translating content whether browsed, typed or scanned is nearly instantaneous. Just point your device’s camera at printed text and watch as the translation is automatically overlaid over the video stream – creating subtitles for everyday life. You can also type to translate with your keyboard and hear translations spoken with a native speaker’s accent.

The Translator app is the perfect companion when traveling. The app can help overcome language barriers, even when there’s no internet connection. Save on expensive data plans when traveling with offline language packs for select languages so you can travel with confidence, even in the most remote locations. More language packs coming soon.

The Share Charm lets you quickly translate highlighted text in any Windows 8 app, with Snap View you can multi-task while browsing, chatting or more by snapping Bing Translator to the right or left of your screen. With this unique feature, powerful translation technology is just a swipe away in Windows 8 no matter where you are – at your desk or on the go.

For more about the app, check out the Translator for Windows product page, and check back for future developments and updates.

We hope that this app becomes your window to the world, no matter where you are!

– Vikram Dendi,
Director of Product Management,
Microsoft/Bing Translator – Microsoft Research

The post A Window to the World, Bing Translator App for Windows Now Available appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Here is what the marketplace team has to say about the new feature: 

The Auto-refill option can be enabled on any paid subscription, giving more options to subscribers of the Microsoft Translator API ensure effective use of their subscription volumes. Auto-refill provides the ability to ensure that you, or anyone using your subscription, do not reach your usage limit before the end of your subscription period, and thus avoid the resultant loss of service. Auto-refill does this by cancelling your current Translator subscription and creating a new subscription before you reach your usage limit. All this happens seamlessly, without interrupting the service.

How Does it Work?

You subscription gives you a certain allotment of transactions, users, characters or other discrete limits (characters – for translator). Once you enable Auto-refill on a particular subscription, Windows Azure Marketplace monitors your character balance for the current subscription period. If your balance reaches 10% or less of your subscription limit, and you have not used up your maximum number of Auto-refills in the past 30 days (or have chosen unlimited Auto-refills), Windows Azure Marketplace re-subscribes you to, and charges you the then-effective subscription rate for, a new subscription, thereby giving you  new subscription period and new character balance. In addition, any characters remaining immediately before Auto-refill occurred are carried over to your new subscription so that you don’t lose anything you already paid for.

Who Can Benefit From Auto-refill?

Scenario 1 – Manage Anticipated Spikes in Volume

If you are running a promotional campaign for your application you might see higher than expected traffic during the promotion. If you don’t know what your target reach may be and want to ensure no interruption in service, you could select the “Unlimited” refill option during the course of the promotion. This will ensure that any unanticipated spikes are supported. In the month following the promotion, you can then modify your subscription and auto-refill needs accordingly. 

Scenario 2 – Manage Your Costs

The cyclical nature of projects may require higher or lower volumes in given months. Some months your usage may require only 4M characters and in others your usage may increase to 32M characters. With the auto-refill feature you can set your monthly volume to 4M with an auto-refill option of 8 refills.By leveraging the auto-refill feature, you are able to better manage your subscription to your lowest anticipated volumes / costs and then increase your volumes as needed. Allowing you to minimize time spent monitoring your usage and save costs over a larger subscription every month.   

Step-by-Step to Enable Auto-Refill for Microsoft Translator

Step 1: Select “Enable Auto Refill”

Step 2: Enter the Number of refills, agree to the terms and conditions, and click “Submit”

Step 3: Return to summary where uou should now see your available refills and option to “Edit Auto Refill”

Click here to learn more about the Auto-refill feature and here to learn more about other release features for Windows Azure Marketplace.

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