Providing sample foreign phrases in a person’s own voice could be encouraging, or easier to imitate. The new technique could also be used to help students learn a language, said Soong. “For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we’ll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output a different language, but still in his own voice,” said Soong. “We will be able to do quite a few scenario applications,” said Soong, who created the system with colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia, the company’s second-largest research lab, in Beijing, China.
In English, a synthetic version of Mundie’s voice welcomed the audience to an open day held by Microsoft Research, concluding, “With the help of this system, now I can speak Mandarin.” The phrase was repeated in Mandarin Chinese, in what was still recognizably Mundie’s voice. Hear Rick Rashid’s voice in his native language and then translated into several other languages:Įnglish: Listen to a clip of Rick Rashid talking normally.
In a second demonstration, Soong used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin. In a demonstration at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft’s research efforts. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers. Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don’t.