Babelfish like technology would be a dream come true for me. At this point in time, google translate speech recognition works well when the speaker speaks a bit slow and uses simple sentences. The translation is the same, works well for simple sentences even though the translations in my language sound weird because it uses the equivalent of old English. There is still a way to go before speech recognition can recognize fast speech with colloquialisms, and probably even a longer way to go before it can translate longer sentences with abstractions into something that is clear and concise in the target language.
> There is still a way to go before speech recognition can recognize fast speech with colloquialisms, and probably even a longer way to go before it can translate longer sentences with abstractions into something that is clear and concise in the target language.
Did you watch the video tweeted by Facebook's CTO?
The speed, accent, and word choices of the speaker would throw off previous state-of-the-art tech.
The amazing thing about this new unsupervised algorithm is they can throw unlimited amounts of unlabeled audio and text at a computer and wait for it to become great. It's not AGI but it is still amazing. Language detection is also already solved so there really is no labeling required.
