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49 days ago
Very few people know that anyone can write code using our translation Api, and even fewer know about the interface available in the Bing Api. I’ll use the later for this next sample: an ASPX page that invokes the translation services, show the result and then invokes the Speech feature from the client (using Javascript). Let’s start with the basics: the Bing Api offers tons of services, and anyone can use it - all you need to to is apply for an AppId. Follow the instructions at http://www.bing.com/developers/appids.aspx and you’ll get one immediately. Once you have your shiny new code, you can then start playing with the many (many) samples available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251056.aspx. It’s a quite powerful Api, and it works really well. For the sake of this project we’ll only use the Translate methods. There are three “flavors” of protocols available: JSON, XML and SOAP. the XML protocol is really simple: it’s basically a REST implementation that ...
50 days ago
So here is a first sample application using the new service. It’s a really basic Javascript client that doesn’t do much more than formatting a string with the url and the correct parameters to invoke the T2S feature. The only thing that is remotely interesting is that this string is passed directly to the Media Player Active X, so there’s no extra work to play the wave file. You can play with the app here: http://www.h2ktech.net/h2ktechsamples/Translate2SpeechSample.aspx (by the way, I’ll be posting all new samples to this very same location). You can ‘view source’ to check the code, or simply download it from the text file: http://www.h2ktech.net/h2ktechsamples/Translate2SpeechSample.cs.txt The two Javascript functions work as follows: InvokeService builds the string based on the content of the textbox (there’s some basic filtering to emulate escaping some characters) and adds the language parameters based on the dropdown. PlayWave: uses the iframe as a ...
51 days ago
So my new personal project is taking shape, but as I mentioned in my previous post it will probably take a long time before there’s any real product implementation of a Speech-to-speech translator. That said, I believe there’s nothing preventing us from seriously integrating Text-to-Speech with our current offerings. For the few of you that have been following this blog – yes, I know it’s not a new concept. The first TBot even had it implemented somehow (see http://mtbotprototype.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3F1A4578DEE8B!376.entry ). Unfortunately, it takes a while to create momentum to push for ideas. The circumstances have changed since February 2008, and now I believe it’s time to start pushing – our team now has open APIS for translations (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd576287.aspx), more languages and a heck of a lot more hits daily. Since we’ve already reached out and offered developers and webmasters/blog owners ways to incorporate MT to theirs sites or ...
119 days ago
Now that TBot is stable, and the new version is almost ready, it’s time to start playing with other prototypes. After more than 2 years interacting with TBot users I can say that I learned a lot, and that one of my first assumptions still holds true; people do adapt to get better results of the tools they use. Based on that I’ve been investigating yet another way to combine existing pieces of technology to build something new. Everyone know that Microsoft has made significant investment on speech recognition and synthesis, so it is possible – at least in theory – to put it all together and build a Speech to Speech translation application. No, I’m not talking about Captain Kirk’s Universal Translator – yet… Project Presto is still very limited, but it does work – and if you use simple, short sentences the results can be pretty good. Here are two videos: English to Portuguese and English to Japanese (Takako help me select sentences that would provide better translations for ...
126 days ago
We're almost there... TBot 2 is doing really well in the production environment serving thousands of translation requests daily, and things are really healthy. Yes, we still have bugs, and we haven't reached the same level of stability we used to have with the Live Agents implementation, however the main functionality is complete. And as you probably already noticed the good old friendly face is back! Fixing an airplane while flying is always fun :-). And by the way: more languages to be added soon. Cheers, Helvecio English - Portuguese Nós estamos quase lá … TBot 2 está rodando bem no ambiente de produção que serve milhares de pedidos de tradução diariamente e as coisas são realmente saudáveis. Sim, ainda temos bugs, e ainda não chegámos ao mesmo nível de estabilidade que tinhamos com a implementação do Live Agents, no entanto, a funcionalidade principal está completa. E vocês devem ter notado que aquele rosto conhecido está aparecendo novamente – a imagem antiga ...
