“The way we design computers today,” Microsoft researcher Hong Tan says, “it would seem that people only use their eyes.” Sure, we tap on our device screens, slide our fingertips across the glass, and type on on-screen keyboards. Sometimes, we give voice commands and listen…
When violence related to Mexico’s drug war erupted in 2006, Andrés Monroy-Hernández kept in close touch with friends and relatives in the north of the country, where he is from and where much of the violence was concentrated. He soon learned that the local news…
Most of us can only dream of having the perfect personal assistant, one who is always there when needed, anticipating our every request and unobtrusively organizing our lives. Cortana, the new digital personal assistant powered by Bing that comes with Windows Phone 8.1, brings users…
Springtime on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast. A perfect little café perched high above the sea, the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms wafting past. You open the menu, hungry for lunch. Oh, wait—you don’t know any Italian. Now what? Not to worry: Just whip out…
Speech-to-speech translation promises to help connect our world Among the futuristic gadgets in the classic TV show Star Trek, none seemed more useful than the universal translator, a handheld gizmo that helped foster understanding among intergalactic civilizations. Well, we needn’t travel beyond the solar system to…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research During Interspeech 2011, the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research It always helps to be prepared. Just ask Ivan Tashev. A principal software architect in the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Tashev played an integral role in developing the audio technology that enabled Kinect for Xbox 360…
By Gary Alt, Writer, Microsoft Imagine mining the web to learn a language. No, not the jargon of webspeak, where IMHO means “in my humble opinion” or F2F is “face to face,” but real, spoken languages, such as Spanish, Hindi, or Japanese. That’s the notion…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research In disaster relief, every hour makes a difference, and communication is essential. When aid efforts began after the recent Haiti earthquake, a request came to the Machine Translation team within Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) group from Microsoft…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’re steering with your left hand while your right is punching car-stereo buttons in eager search of that amazing new Lady Gaga song. Your mobile phone rings, and as you adjust your headset—hands-free, naturally—the driver in front of…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Many people are accustomed to donning headphones to enjoy music at a desired volume without inflicting their tunes on others nearby. But there are tradeoffs inherent in the headphones experience. For one, you’re generally physically tethered to the…
