How Skype Used AI to Build Its Amazing New Language Translator

Very soon now, a select group of Skype beta testers will have a new Microsoft technology that seems borrowed from the world of Star Trek. "One of the largest, published, untouched machine translation repositories on the internet is the Microsoft customer support Knowledge Base," says Vikram Dendi, strategy director with Microsoft Research. That work led directly to a big boost in Android's voice recognition software, but behind the scenes, Microsoft was quietly laying the groundwork for Skype translate. >We published those results, then the world changed Microsoft was tinkering with neural networks nearly a decade before Google's cat videos, to improve the handwriting recognition on tablet PCs, Microsoft researcher John Platt recently told WIRED. But the work that led to Skype Translate's most startling breakthrough---the ability to reliably recognize almost anybody's speech---began just before Christmas 2009, when Microsoft Microsoft soon ponied up the funds so that Hinton's ideas could be tested out with the latest graphical processor units.