Microsoft President Satya Nadella announced major new milestones for the Translator API at his BUILD conference keynote today. We would like to provide some additional detail about the announcement here. The headlines: Microsoft Translator API available via the Windows Azure Marketplace at various volume levels to meet your needs Reiterating our support for standards by supporting OData and adding standards based (OAuth) authentication for greater security Publishing the pricing model for the various subscription tiers to best fit your needs (in addition to the free tier that we currently offer) Starting today developers can directly sign up for the Microsoft Translator service on the Windows Azure Marketplace at the level of volume they expect to use. Windows Azure Marketplace is the one stop shop for cloud data, apps and services and we are pleased to utilize this platform to deliver the Translator API to developers. Provisioning the Microsoft Translator API through the Marketplace allows us to deliver the service at higher volumes than we previously could offer, along with the facility to upgrade to higher volume on demand. Additionally, the Marketplace provides a world-class ecommerce back-end which enables us to better serve our global Translator partners and grow with demand. We are also pleased to announce the addition of OData to our already diverse set of interfaces (SOAP, HTTP & AJAX) to the Microsoft Translator service. Once you subscribe to the offer on Azure Marketplace, you can explore the Odata end point by using the Service Explorer. Starting now, developers are also able to use standards based two-leg authentication (OAuth) to secure calls to API (irrespective of the end point they are using). The full details are available in our developer documentation. In response to the tremendous demand from existing as well as new partners that wish to utilize a reliable, consistently available, and developer friendly service, we are also pleased to announce pricing for higher volume usage today. In addition to a no-cost tier that is designed for low-volume and hobbyist use, you can today subscribe to higher volume tiers at an attractive price point. You can subscribe to tiers ranging from 4M (million) characters a month onwards, priced at US $10 per million characters. As an introductory offer, we are also announcing a 120 day (4 month) promotional free trial on all paid subscriptions for a limited time. We hope this would allow you to use the service and determine the volume level you would need for your scenario. Existing licensees and users of our API are not affected by this announcement and will have plenty of notice to prepare for the eventual transition onto the unified Marketplace based platform. Please refer to the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page for more details. Nearly five years ago, we first said “hello world” on this blog. Since then, thanks to an ever increasing user base and enthusiastic developer and business partners we have come a long way. As a team of researchers and engineers at Microsoft Research, we continue to strive to deliver value to Microsoft partners and users worldwide by combining research investments with product development. In addition to our the API, we also provide translation experiences through Bing Translator – our consumer focused webpage and text translation site, through Office, Bing Bar, Internet Explorer and much more. Please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback, comments and questions. We have vibrant user and developer communities where you can discuss the service or ask for help. For questions that aren’t answered in the FAQ or the community, you can also email us at mtcont@microsoft.com (for general comments), or at mtlic@microsoft.com (for specific licensing questions). Please direct any press inquires to mtcont@microsoft.com. We hope to see you soon from the other side of a translation request! Vikram Dendi Director of Product Management Microsoft Translator Updated (9/22): Clarification added to title that the free tier of service is not going away.
Microsoft President Satya Nadella announced major new milestones for the Translator API at his BUILD conference keynote today. We would like to provide some additional detail about the announcement here.
The headlines:
Starting today developers can directly sign up for the Microsoft Translator service on the Windows Azure Marketplace at the level of volume they expect to use. Windows Azure Marketplace is the one stop shop for cloud data, apps and services and we are pleased to utilize this platform to deliver the Translator API to developers. Provisioning the Microsoft Translator API through the Marketplace allows us to deliver the service at higher volumes than we previously could offer, along with the facility to upgrade to higher volume on demand. Additionally, the Marketplace provides a world-class ecommerce back-end which enables us to better serve our global Translator partners and grow with demand.
We are also pleased to announce the addition of OData to our already diverse set of interfaces (SOAP, HTTP & AJAX) to the Microsoft Translator service. Once you subscribe to the offer on Azure Marketplace, you can explore the Odata end point by using the Service Explorer. Starting now, developers are also able to use standards based two-leg authentication (OAuth) to secure calls to API (irrespective of the end point they are using). The full details are available in our developer documentation.
In response to the tremendous demand from existing as well as new partners that wish to utilize a reliable, consistently available, and developer friendly service, we are also pleased to announce pricing for higher volume usage today. In addition to a no-cost tier that is designed for low-volume and hobbyist use, you can today subscribe to higher volume tiers at an attractive price point. You can subscribe to tiers ranging from 4M (million) characters a month onwards, priced at US $10 per million characters. As an introductory offer, we are also announcing a 120 day (4 month) promotional free trial on all paid subscriptions for a limited time. We hope this would allow you to use the service and determine the volume level you would need for your scenario. Existing licensees and users of our API are not affected by this announcement and will have plenty of notice to prepare for the eventual transition onto the unified Marketplace based platform. Please refer to the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page for more details.
Nearly five years ago, we first said “hello world” on this blog. Since then, thanks to an ever increasing user base and enthusiastic developer and business partners we have come a long way. As a team of researchers and engineers at Microsoft Research, we continue to strive to deliver value to Microsoft partners and users worldwide by combining research investments with product development. In addition to our the API, we also provide translation experiences through Bing Translator – our consumer focused webpage and text translation site, through Office, Bing Bar, Internet Explorer and much more. Please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback, comments and questions. We have vibrant user and developer communities where you can discuss the service or ask for help. For questions that aren’t answered in the FAQ or the community, you can also email us at mtcont@microsoft.com (for general comments), or at mtlic@microsoft.com (for specific licensing questions). Please direct any press inquires to mtcont@microsoft.com.
We hope to see you soon from the other side of a translation request!
Vikram Dendi Director of Product Management Microsoft Translator
Updated (9/22): Clarification added to title that the free tier of service is not going away.
This is the year of machine learning and big data. Whether it is predicting political results, supercharging your Excel spreadsheets, helping map queries to intent in Search, or even customizing a translation engine to best fit your content – these research areas are playing a starring role in transforming technology and productivity.
A couple of weeks back, at the 14th annual Computing in the 21st Century Conference, attendees saw a glimpse of where else these technologies are taking us – and loved it. Rick Rashid, who heads up Microsoft Research worldwide, went up on stage and in the span of eight sentences, got the 2000+ strong crowd up on their feet and cheering. It was a moment where technology was indistinguishable from magic – and one that would spur science fiction writers to start thinking of bigger challenges for researchers to tackle :)
Watch the video to see for yourself:
A combination of powerful technologies were employed to make this amazing demonstration possible: Deep Neural Network based processing combined with high performance computing allowed a significant jump in accuracy of speech recognition. The Microsoft Translator technology that you use each day was customized to best fit Rick’s speech content. New speech synthesis technology that allows personalization of acoustic characteristics was able to create “Rick’s voice” in a language he does not speak. You can read Rick’s blog post here.
Some of these technologies are already available today, especially the industry-leading translation (Microsoft Translator) with customization capabilities (Translator Hub). If you are a Windows Phone user, you have been enjoying the most innovative translation app on any phone for over a year now, which includes an early speech translation experience that has been tuned for travel situations. The audio output that you hear on Bing Translator website uses some of the newer speech synthesis engines coming out of our Speech research. Deep-Neural-Net research is also behind our audio/video indexing service – MAVIS, which is available commercially.
The excitement that has been rippling across the web in response to this demonstration is an indicator of how much everyone wants to experience this ‘magic’. There is much work to do, but you will see the benefits of this amazing research in our products in our future releases.
Vikram Dendi Director Microsoft/Bing Translator & Microsoft Research
Special guest post from Microsoft Research Connections Director Kristin Tolle, who has been working with the Mayan community to enable them to preserve their language. Microsoft Translator Hub provides a means for communities and businesses to build custom language translation systems.
At X’Caret, the Mayan eco-archaeological park in Carmen Del playa, the Rector of the Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, Professor Francisco Rosado-May and I along with Governor of Quintara Roo, Roberto Borge Angulo, unveiled the custom Mayan to Spanish translation system to demonstrate it to the community on December 21st, 2012—a date that coincided with the end of the 13th b’ak’tun and the beginning of the 14th. A fitting beginning for the Mayan-Spanish translation system.
I mentioned what an honor it is in a Microsoft Research Connections blog to work with local communities to create new translation models. What is special about the Microsoft Translator Hub is that it enables this capability “at home” by putting the power of developing a translation system into the hands of the organizations that care about it the most—the communities themselves.
An organization’s small data can be combined with our big data for the major languages to aid in the training of a new system—keeping it in use for coming generations or as the Mayans say, b’ak’tun. This is incredibly important to culture and language preservation as Carlos Allende, Public Sector Director Microsoft México explains, “The Microsoft Translator Hub is Microsoft’s contribution to worldwide cultures. In Mexico we are proud that this incredible technology is displayed for celebrating the Mayan Katun for keeping this language alive and allowing the next generation to have access to this millenarian knowledge.”
It takes a great deal of effort to build a translation model between two languages. One of the features of the Microsoft Translator Hub is that one can do this directly—create a translation model between two languages without having to go through a “pivot” language (usually English). And this is what the local university, Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, has set out to do; to translate from Mayan to Spanish and vice versa.
The process began in May of this year when the Rector of the University, Professor Francisco Rosado-May, met with us at the LATAM Faculty Summit held in Cancun to discuss how it might be possible for his institution to work on Yucatec, a local Mayan dialect, as well as other related languages.
“The Translator Hub by Microsoft is not only a powerful software that facilitates the proper communication between Maya and Spanish but it is also a very important tool to achieve one of the strategic goals of our university: to preserve and increase the use of Maya,” said Professor Rosado-May who went on to explain the significance of language preservation, “Language is the genetic code of any culture, by understanding and using a lot more Maya, we also understand better the mental processes that trigger the construction of knowledge. In the case of Maya, that means understanding how they created sophisticated knowledge such as the zero, astronomy, mathematics, etc. This is why my University and I appreciate so much what Microsoft is doing with the Translator Hub.”
What is being unveiled today is a result of the hard work of linguistics professor, Martin Equival-Pat, his students, local language experts and the support of the local government agencies and Microsoft Mexico. Through their work the university has been able to build a Spanish to Yucatec and Yucatec to Spanish translation system that is just the beginning. As Rosado-May goes on to elaborate, “I expect that the hub will play an important role for the years to come in positioning the Maya language in the global world. We might be witnessing something special for the Baktuns ahead of us and contributing to one of the most important dreams all over the world: live in peace by understanding each other better, and recognizing that different cultures and different languages are important for peace.”
Microsoft Mexico fully supports this project and is comitted to the Mayan society. As Juan Alberto González Esparza, General Director Microsoft México explains, “Think for a moment of a situation where a Spanish speaker and a Maya person communicate with one another in their own languages using a computer or a phone. This is the world that Microsoft has imagined and now this is a reality thanks the Microsoft Translator HUB-Maya; that brings to the new age the Mayan language with all its culture, meanings, stories and lifestyle that will be preserved and available to everyone worldwide. This is the way we are generating a real impact in vulnerable communities connecting people with the potential of our technology.”
As we entered into the 14th b’ak’tun on December 22nd energized and engaged; the possibilities for the impact of the Hub and the impact of language preservation throughout the world are limitless.
- Kristin Tolle Director, Natural User Interactions Team Microsoft Research Connections
Microsoft Translator offers great tools for web developers. With the Microsoft Translator Widget you can add translation to all of the content of your site, giving the user control over what language they read your site in.
With the Microsoft Translator API you can get access to our service allowing you to translate any user generated or other text. In this walkthrough you’ll learn how to use both of these, adding a widget to the master page of an ASP.NET site, as well as how to sign up for the translator API and use it in your ASP.NET code.
The walkthrough takes you through everything you need to know, including where and how to get the free Visual Studio tools for web developers, signing up for the API, generating a widget and writing the code that you need to access the API.
You can read the complete walk through here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/webapptranslator.aspx
Today Microsoft celebrates the International Mother Language Day alongside UNESCO, with the goal to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism across the world. 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.
With the proliferation of digital content on the web, mobile devices and desktop applications, there is an increasing demand to communicate and collaborate in multiple languages. Helping enable business, communities, and consumers to communicate and collaborate across language barriers through technology innovation is a core focus for the Microsoft Translator team.
Today, I am pleased to announce the launch of two new officially supported languages: Malay and Urdu. These two languages join the other languages already supported by the Microsoft Translator platform and Bing Translator. Malay is spoken by over 200M people worldwide in countries ranging from Malaysia to Brunei. Urdu is spoken by over 100M people worldwide and is spoken by large populations residing in the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and countries in Europe and North America. It is the national language of Pakistan, and the official language of several states in India.
A year ago, on the last International Mother Language Day, we announced the release of Hmong as part of a close engagement between Microsoft and the Hmong community - a small but significant step towards empowering businesses and organizations to tap into the power of Microsoft’s language technology. Like Hmong, the development of Urdu is the result of a community effort shepherded by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India) under the leadership of Dr.Girish Nath Jha, and Microsoft, utilizing the powerful Microsoft Translator Hub customization tools.
In addition to the launch of these new languages; we are also rolling out several new improvements to our platform, customization tools and language quality. See the release notes for this release in our forum here.
We have seen some great momentum with both the business and language communities for the Translator Hub. Through the Hub, users are able to bring better and specialized translation quality to established languages, as well as the many native languages of the world that are not yet supported by major translation providers which goes to the core of supporting the goals of Mother Language Day. Urdu is the latest language community benefiting from the availability of the Hub.
Developers and webmasters can begin leveraging these languages today on their sites by installing the Microsoft Translator Widget and users can utilize the collaborative features of the widget to provide alternate translations to improve the translation quality. Additionally, if you are passionate about the community development efforts around Urdu or other languages that we support and want to become involved in the efforts, please contact us.
Commemorating the International Mother Language Day, Microsoft Local Language Program (LLP), also announced the support of 13 extra languages to our range of Language Interface Packs (LIPs), bringing the total number of languages supported by Windows 8 and Office to 108. Learn more at the LLP web site.
- Vikram Dendi, Director of Product Management, Microsoft/Bing Translator