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

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