You won't believe how fast this Microsoft plug-in translates languages in PowerPoint
What's better than a presentation to one audience? A presentation that can be given to any audience in any country, in any language, without laborious hand-translation.
That's the promise of a new Microsoft PowerPoint cognitive service, PowerPoint Presentation Translator cooked up by Garage (Microsoft's experimental project arm) and demonstrated publicly for the first time on Wednesday at the company's Build developers conference in Seattle.
PowerPoint Presentation Translator can auto-translate slides in any one of a dozen languages, including Hungarian, Czech, French, Chinese, German and Spanish. Even more impressively, it will live-translate the presenter's word in a caption box just below the presentation.
Backed by machine learning, the cognitive service doesn't just try to find a language match for every word -- it looks at context.
In the preview demonstration I saw, PowerPoint Translator left the slide acronyms intact, while properly translating the slide text around it.
Its real-time captioning appeared instantly, a semi-miracle considering the cacophony in the demo room. That said, not being a German or Spanish speaker, I can't speak to the veracity of the translation. The few words I did pick up looked accurate.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has demonstrated its real-time translation prowess. We first saw the service at work in Skype Translator almost three years ago. Now the service is migrating to other Microsoft tools.
It's another demonstration of how Microsoft can use the wealth of data it has in the cloud and apply it as local artificial intelligence in some of its most popular productivity products.
Harry Shum, Microsoft's executive vice president of artificial intelligence (AI) said in a release that this is just beginning.
"AI now has the potential to disrupt every single vertical industry, like banking or retail, and every single business process, from sales and marketing to HR and recruiting."
Topics Microsoft
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
