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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

Seamless translation is... Pretty incredible.

I speak English and Spanish, so I recorded some English sentences and listened to the Spanish output it generated. It came damn close to my own Spanish (although I have more Castilianisms in mine, which of course I wouldn't expect it to know)

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A real test here would be to give it to my friend from Mendoza, Argentina.

I'm bilingual and still can't understand him. I'm not even sure half the things he says are actual words.

I tried it and it sounded nothing like me at all - just some random "generic" male voice that translate what I said into german. My wife put it as "that's shit - sounds nothing like you". Nuff said.

Some for me. I'm a man with a relatively deep voice. The translation was read out by some generic female AI voice.

I think you clicked the wrong recording. The generic female AI voice is the translation of what you said.

which is good. do you really want a deep-fake? that noone can distinguish?

If that’s how it’s being advertised, and that’s the reason people are giving it a shot based on that advertising, then I certainly do! And so, I imagine, did the people who have left feedback so far!

Being good would be bad, therefore being bad is actually good.

Same for me.

I also tried speaking German and translating it to English and when I said "Hallo ich wollte das nur mal ausprobieren" (Hello I just wanted to try this out) it translated it to "Hi, how are you? Do you know anyone who quit smoking?".

I feel gaslit.

I don't recommend using gas lighting near your lit cigarette.

I translated from French to English and vice versa and the voice sounded nothing like me in either case. The English to French translation also made me sound about 90 years old.

Did it _sound_ like you though? It doesn't sound remotely like me.

It didn't really the first time. I recorded a second one and annunciated really strong/well (and said more) -- that yielded the positive results.

Whether "we're there yet" on translation technology is still debated, but at some point we'll consider it "good enough" for most practical use cases, truly removing the linguistic barrier. This is actually both terrifying and exciting, because then it'll definitely start influencing spoken language to at least some degree.

It depends how much tolerance you have for mistakes. For a waiter or asking directions or things like that, 100% this works great. For a diplomatic discussion where nuance is very important however... It also doesn't work great for translating works of art where the translation itself is open-ended and can be done in a bunch of different ways and requires a lot of editorial/artistic decisions from the translator.

Unfortunate that the examples they provide were absolutely terrible and robotic.

It put me off from actually trying it, I might reconsider.

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