Amazon Launches Live Translation Mode for Alexa (venturebeat.com) 10
Amazon today rolled out Live Translation, a new Alexa feature that aims to assist with conversations between people who speak two different languages by leveraging speech recognition and machine translation technology. Amazon says that Live Translation can interpret between a number of dialects in real time, including English and French, Spanish, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, German, or Italian. From a report: The pandemic appears to have supercharged voice app usage, which was already on an upswing. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, the percentage of voice-enabled device owners who use commands at least once a day rose between the beginning of 2020 and the start of April. Just over a third of smart speaker owners say they listen to more music, entertainment, and news from their devices than they did before, and owners report requesting an average of 10.8 tasks per week from their assistant this year compared with 9.4 different tasks in 2019. And according to a new report from Juniper Research, consumers will interact with voice assistants on 8.4 billion devices by 2024. Launching Live Translation requires asking Alexa on an Amazon Echo device to translate one of the supported languages. The command "Alexa, translate French" will translate between English and French, for example, while "Alexa, stop" will end the translation session. The Echo will beep during the session to indicate when to speak in the other language, and Echo devices with a screen like the Echo Show will display a transcription of the conversation. Users can take pauses between sentences, and Alexa will automatically detect the language in which they're speaking and translate each side of the conversation.
Let's make a loop! (Score:1)
Dialects? (Score:3)
A dialect is a variety of a language, not a completely different language altogether. The way it's written seems to imply that all those languages are dialects.
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Tried it. Poor results. (Score:3)
I said "Alexa, translate Spanish", then said "Buenos dias, como esta usted", and it replied with something in Spanish beyond my "took Spanish in High School 50 years ago and have lived in California for 40 years" knowledge of Spanish, such as it is.
I tried again, and it replied with some other Spanish phrase.
I suppose it's likely that my hideous accent in Spanish was giving it fits. A Salvadoran friend who left a message on Xfinity voice mail, in English, got transcribed as if it were Spanish, with hilarious results when I pasted the transcript into Google Translate, so this may well be the opposite problem.
now if only (Score:3)
Now if it only would translate what my wife really means when she says something.
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The first rule of girlfriend/wife translation is:
"I'm fine!" --> "I'm not fine, you have to guess what the problem is but it's probably you."
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Too many of us have heard the following:
"What did I do?"
"You know what you did! Don't pretend that you don't!"
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Too many of us have heard the following:
"What did I do?"
"You know what you did! Don't pretend that you don't!"
"I've done quite a number of things recently, and it's clear that one or more of them have upset you. I will be happy to address this issue and apologize where necessary, but I lack your perspective - otherwise, I wouldn't have said or done that thing in the first place. If you are willing to help me understand what is bothering you, we can resolve this. If not, then that's fine, but in doing so, please understand that prolonging this conflict despite my willingness to work toward a resolution sends a messa
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Good luck with that . . .
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