Speech recognition is something we humans do remarkably well, which includes our ability to understand speech even in noisy multi-talker environments. While our natural sophistication at this is something we take for granted, speech recognition researchers continue to pursue refinements and improvements on the frontiers…
Released in preview this week at Build 2018, the new Microsoft Translator custom feature lets users customize neural machine translation systems. These customizations can be applied to both text and speech translation workflows. Microsoft Translator released neural machine translation (NMT) in 2016. NMT provided major…
Over the last decade, advances in machine learning coupled with the availability of large amounts of data have led to significant progress on long-standing AI challenges. In domains like computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation and image captioning, machines have reached and sometimes even exceeded…
Last year, Microsoft’s speech and dialog research group announced a milestone in reaching human parity on the Switchboard conversational speech recognition task, meaning we had created technology that recognized words in a conversation as well as professional human transcribers. After our transcription system reached the…
By Bill Dolan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research This year, the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will be held in Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016, at Humboldt University. ACL is the premier conference on natural language processing (NLP) systems and computational linguistics.…
By Harold Javid, General Chair, Faculty Summit Microsoft Research’s annual Faculty Summit opened Wednesday with a series of talks about how technological innovation can benefit both business and society. In a fireside chat with Jeannette M. Wing, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of the company's basic…
By Guobin Wu, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia What does it take to make it to the “decisive round for the finest few” in the Beauty of Programming Contest 2016? Earlier this year, 60 young experts gathered at the Microsoft Shanghai campus to…
By Chris Basoglu, Partner Engineering Manager, Microsoft Technology and Research Earlier this year, Microsoft made its open source Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), a tool used to speed up advances in artificial intelligence, available on GitHub. Today, with CNTK 1.5, we are adding significant language enhancements,…
By George Thomas Jr., Writer, Microsoft Adding to an already lengthy list of accolades, Li Deng, partner research manager in Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. lab, has received the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to deep learning and to automatic speech…
Posted by Allison Linn When most people use automated speech recognition technology today, it's because they have a task that needs to get done: A person to call, directions to get, a quick text to send. In China, millions of people are using this type…
In the 1999 American film Bicentennial Man, the late Robin Williams played a robot who strives to achieve the physical, social and legal status of a human being. The character’s growing language capabilities—his capacity to communicate fluently with his human family—proved crucial in his quest.…
How did you do in your high school linguistics courses? What? Your high school didn’t offer any linguistics classes? Well, you’re not alone; it’s difficult to find any secondary school in the world that formally teaches linguistics. As a scientist, I find that unfortunate. It…
