Machine translation products began to appear as early as 2010, but more applications are mainly in the C-side scenes such as tourism, social networking, and business, and the simultaneous interpretation of conferences is still the highest challenge in the field.
The 17-year Boao Forum for Asia’s first use of AI simultaneous interpretation was not only an important change made by this year’s international top forum, but also a “Tenxun simultaneous biography” test that was not a small challenge. As such, Ma Huateng was also in the circle of friends. Tencent's peers who are preparing for the training of Boao are not unfazed by the "new trials and many excuse."
According to Tencent's QQ browser and Li Xuechao, the head of “Tencent Translation Jun”, who received an exclusive interview with the program, Tencent’s peers were officially put into use in various forums before the opening of the Boao Forum for Asia in April 9th. Simultaneous interpretation can complete the translation result in the case of free multi-lingual switching; the use of the process also found some bad examples, the team has been repaired in time, in line with the expectations of AI simultaneous interpretation.
However, after the previous trial, it will also usher in today's exam. The Boao Forum for Asia officially held its opening ceremony this morning. As one of the opening ceremony simultaneous interpretation support, Tencent simultaneous interpretation will be conducted together with the artificial interpretation to provide bilingualism for the conference. Minute service.
Li Xuechao told the awareness process that the Tencent simultaneous transmission mainly used the "on-site screening" and "small program" two modes. The leaders, dignitaries and international friends attending the meeting can watch the text of the speech in real time through the large screen of the venue; Users who watch the opening ceremony remotely can scan the Tencent simultaneous transmission applet to obtain the Chinese and English bilingual speech content of the conference. They can also “click and listen” to listen to the speech.
The title of "Tengxun Translation Jun"
Tencent artificial intelligence simultaneous interpretation solution consists of two parts: "Tencent Translation King" + "WeChat Zhizhi."
Li Xuechao said that the actual principle of simultaneous interpretation on the Boao Forum for Asia is that WeChat Zhizhi recognizes vocals as text, and Tencent translators translate the text into target languages and broadcast them through speech synthesis.
The “WeChat Smart Listening” team was established as early as in 2011; by comparison, “Tencent Translator” is much later, and this team created by MIG incubator was established in 2016. Tencent Translator and WeChat Master The fit for Tencent simultaneous biography is in 2017.
Along with Tencent’s diligent layout, technological transformation in the field of translation is also rapidly occurring. In early 2016, Tencent began to develop AI translation products. At that time, the entire industry was adopting SMT's statistical machine translation technology. The core algorithm behind it was based on phrases. Machine translation, high error rate.
The singularity of technology appeared at the end of 2016. Google has made a major breakthrough in machine translation. The published neural network machine translation system (GN Neural Machine Translation), abbreviated as GNMT, has achieved the greatest improvement in machine translation quality so far.
It is precisely this breakthrough that the Tencent team of translators quickly turned and adopted NMT technology. The translation team developed the TNMT algorithm based on the neural network algorithm and Tencent data. Not only did it win within Tencent, it quickly established itself. The core advantages.
Today, “Tencent Translation Jun” has already supported 15 languages. Daily translation requests exceed 400 million. Prior to the Boao Forum for Asia, Tencent has had nearly a dozen live games, including the VMWARE China Women’s Development Forum, 2018 Tencent Year. Yes, 2018 WeChat Open Class Pro, Tencent Media + Summit, etc. The accuracy of Chinese speech recognition on the conference site can reach 97% on average, and the acceptable degree of translation is over 92%.
The difficulties in simultaneous interpretation have long been known to the industry. Li Xuechao knew about the procedure and said that before the large-scale conference, Tencent could not get the speech. This requires Tencent's simultaneous interpretation to fully address the various conditions on the scene. .
For example, at the Tencent annual meeting in early 2018, Ma Huateng decided to use unprepared Tencent simultaneous interpretation on the spot. “But after the results were used, everyone was more emboldened by this simultaneous interpretation of the translators and the WeChat wisdom. Li Xuechao said.
However, at the Boao Forum for Asia, the complexity of the situation on the scene put forward higher requirements for Tencent's simultaneous transmission. For the special scenes with high professionalism and extensive coverage of the forum, Tencent Translation Jun also supports customization through terminology, domain adaptation and other technologies. To further optimize the translation results. WeChat Zhizhi also conducted special optimization training for the national and regional language features of the Boao Forum guests, and realized the parallel recognition of multi-person and multi-lingual conversations through engineering optimization to ensure the accuracy of on-site recognition.
However, Li Xuechao told the awareness process, although Tencent Translation Jun has already supported 15 languages, the Boao Forum for Asia still uses only Chinese and English translations.
The Way Forward of "Tenxun Biography"
In Boao, Tencent became the industry's first AI simultaneous messaging service that supports simultaneous multi-channel viewing and playback of simultaneous bi-lingual content, including on-site video casting, small program viewing, voice listening, and meeting minutes playback.
The Tencent simultaneous biography applet also debuted in this forum.
Li Xuechao said that at the beginning of the translation of the Premier League, the main entry point is the individual user market under the tourism scene. It provides individual consumers with text translation, voice translation, photo-taking translation, oral language follow-up assessment and other types of translation services, and can pass Mobile App, WeChat public number, WeChat applet, PC web version and other channels.
With the blowout of machine translation and translation requirements, more and more fields have begun to emerge with the demands of online, intelligent, and efficient translation. The translator has gradually expanded from spoken language and tourism to WeChat, QQ, "Arena of Valor" and other social areas, as well as QQ browser, QQ mailbox, even extended to finance, education, hardware and other industries.
Compared to other products, Tencent’s rapid expansion still reflects Tencent’s platform advantages and the Tencent team's understanding of online scenarios. “After we have strong technical products, we also make full use of Tencent’s powerful platform. Many user scenarios and needs can infiltrate. Therefore, we can continuously access Tencent translation from the platform, because our business is going to the sea, we can gradually find more landing scenes.” Li Xuechao said.
For the two most important mobile platforms, the App and the applet, Tencent has adopted different operating strategies. For example, oral follow-up is a very important use case for translation applications. After Tencent’s translator observes this, Set up bilingual posters, spoken language learning, and other functional contents within the app to increase player stickiness.
As for the applet, it is more in the WeChat ecosystem. With its features of no downloading and ready-to-go, the translator brings more visits to the translator and more users experience, highlighting the core practical functions - translation. Li Xuechao told the public awareness program that at present, the Tencent Translation Jungle Program is mainly used by individual users, and the Tencent simultaneous transmission applet officially launched at the Boao Forum for Asia serves the meeting needs, connects to the B side, and provides Participants who are interested in the conference and remote participants.
In the aspect of enterprise-level customer service interaction, Li Xuechao also stated that there are two main methods for Tencent simultaneous transmission. The first is the offline server model, which adopts specialized VIP-style services, and is translated by the team's technical staff and the WeChat team. To the on-site support. The second is cloud services, which are jointly provided by Tencent Cloud. When users and companies have needs, they can experience and satisfy through Tencent Cloud.
Is AI and man-made simultaneous interpretation a war or a blend?
The rapid development of artificial intelligence simultaneous interpretation has also left the industry with a long-standing question. Will AI replace humans in the end?
In fact, along with Tencent's simultaneous interpretation on the first day of the Boao Forum for Asia, the issue of accuracy of translation has also caused concern in the industry. In response, Tencent responded that due to various “novelty” linguistic knowledge, technical terms, The English schools in all parts of the world are melting in one oven, coupled with noises from microphones, echoes and other ambient sounds, which pose a great challenge to Tencent's interpretation.
“Tencent is still learning and growing. For some guest nouns, flipping sentences, and guest speakers speaking fluently between Chinese and English, it is necessary to continue to strengthen learning.” Tencent simultaneous transmission is not an alternative, but an industry Capable.
As for the online transmission, due to the poor performance of on-site translation, on the afternoon of April 9th, Tencent’s emergency recruitment of artificial replenishment at the Sigma Building in Haidian, and knowing the process to verify it with Tencent’s simultaneous transcript, received a response that it was completely a Dragon.
Tencent's interpreters told the awareness process that the so-called invitation for simultaneous interpretation was not for the Tencent interpreting team to use for on-site AI simultaneous interpretation. Instead, they served Tencent news team to do professional reports such as closed-door interviews. Moreover, most of the conference’s Originally, the form of AI simultaneous transmission and manual simultaneous transmission was adopted, and there was no need for re-invitations.
Li Xuechao also believes that “language is a communication tool, and machine translation and human translation have their own application scenarios and services.” For example, machine translation can provide tens of millions of translations per day, and it can quickly grasp the new terms of customization. Ability, which is difficult for human translators to copy; and interpersonal comprehension that translators can integrate, grasp of fuzzy semantics, etc. These are machine translations that are difficult to achieve in the short term.
After all, what AI learns is only "smartness," but what humans have is "wisdom."