>> You're not going to miss this episode of THE AI SHOW.
We talk about what's new with Translator,
not just text in a box,
but much more. Make sure you tune in.
>> [MUSIC].
>> Hello, and welcome to this episode of the AI Show,
we've got a special guest with us, Krishna,
to talk about what's new with Translator.
Krishna, tell us who you are and what you do my friend.
>> Hi, I work as a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft.
I've been with Microsoft for 15 plus years and I'm
responsible for Translator Service
and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.
>> Fantastic. Here's a question.
When we talk about translation of text,
I'm used to going to a website and typing in
some text and then out comes the text in a different language.
Is this what we're talking about like an API?
How long have we been doing it, how many languages do we support?
>> We've been doing this for
more than 10 years in Microsoft Translator Service,
and currently we support
more than 70 plus languages in our service.
>> That's amazing. We have APIs that you can just
call and give text to and then languages come back. Is that right?
>> Yes. It's a very simple API and
you make a post request and give a body,
in your request body you give your text and
specify what's your from language and to language and we
get that as translated text back and
[inaudible] and it's a real-time translation.
>> This is really cool. So how are customers receiving this?
How are they using it?
How can we inspire other people to use it as well?
Any challenges that they've had?
>> Yes. Microsoft Translator
is one of the highly consumed cognitive service.
In spite of that, we keep getting feedback from customers
to increase the character limits in
our Realtime Translation API request,
and then we said, "Okay,
let's speak to these customers."
Spoke to those customers and understood what customer is actually
doing about with translating large content of text.
Then we found that customers are
really actually dealing with documents.
It means customer extract textual content from the document,
splits them into smaller chunks,
translate them using our service,
and merge all those translated chunks
back to reconstruct a translated document.
It's really pain when they translate huge volume of documents.
>> Really what customers were doing they were like,
text in the text box is great or an API,
let's just say, but what they were
doing is they were taking documents.
Let's just say, I'm assuming like a Word document,
and they were taking out the texts,
translating it, and then putting it back in. Is that right?
>> Yes. Well, it's not just a Word document.
They translate Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, PDF, any kind of documents.
So you make a presentation for
your company and it's an immense company,
you want to transfer this document,
PowerPoint presentation in one language into Yan languages,
then that's why they are doing it.
>> Did we want them to keep doing it this way?
Did we introduce anything to make it a little bit better for them?
>> Absolutely no.
We don't want them to spend
a whole lot of time in passing the document.
It's a technology in there and what we're going to do is soon,
we are introducing an asynchronous document translation feature as
part of Microsoft Translator service,
which enables user to translate large volume of
documents in variety of file formats, including Text, HTML,
Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook Messages,
or even Adobe PDF,
easily into a single or multiple target languages.
Same time we are going to preserve the layout and
structural as in the original file format.
>> This is actually really cool.
Because basically customers were
showing you what it is that they were doing,
and then you said, "Why not make a service out of it?"
I'm still a little confused about how it might work.
Is there a way that you can show us?
>> Sure. Here you could see two files in
English document stored under
source-en container under sub folder Demo 1,
and we are going to translate these two files into
Spanish language and store them into containers target-es.
I have generated SAS token with time limits for the source and
target containers with necessary read and write permission.
>> Let's pause right here. If I can ask you a couple of questions.
So basically what customers need to do is put
their documents into some
kind of Blob Storage and just put them there.
Is that right? Then this service
will take those things out of there?
>> Absolutely.
>> Okay. Cool.
>> Absolutely. They just put the documents over
the source container in
a Blob Storage and provide read permission to us
and create a target container and provide write permission to
us and make a service request.
I'll show about it, and then boom.
The translation happens and the translator
files goes back to the target container.
>> Let's pause right here if that's okay.
Basically what you're doing is looks like you're
making a post to an endpoint,
but instead of just sending text,
you're sending a location where there might be a lot of documents,
and then a target location to push
the translation of those documents out. Is that right?
>> Absolutely right. We have
some more additional two answers to it.
A user can provide
various filters to translate files in a specific folders,
or they can specify filters like, "Hey,
files starting with something,
and files ending with Blob."
Those kind of filters we provide,
and the good part is we also enable custom translation.
The customer can specify, "Hey,
use the default translation models," or they've spent
good amount of time in building
a custom translation model using our custom translator service,
and they can reuse that here and
translate the documents using their own custom models.
>> I see. This is really cool
because basically what you're doing is you're
submitting a batch job of
a multiple set of documents and
you're basically sending the API a bunch of instructions on,
"Here's what you need to do with all these
documents." Am I getting this right?
>> Absolutely. You specify in
the source URL that
you have the container and you specify the SAS key,
and you specify what's the source language,
and similarly you specifically the target container
URL and model and the target language.
Good thing is you can specify any number of
targets and we translate into multiple languages.
>> So you can do multiple languages at the same time too?
>> Yes, in a single request.
>> That's cool. How long does this process usually take?
>> This process, the part of this service relays
on when you translate large number of
documents in a single request.
We could get say something
like if you send 10 plus documents,
we could send in complete in 20 minutes.
It means on an average we could
get documents translated in less than two minutes.
>> That's cool.
>> Basically this batch job
is something you send and it's something maybe you
do at night and then come back to work, come home.
Well, we're all working from home a little bit too.
But you come back to work and
everything is basically done for you.
>> Yes.
>> Do you have examples of
what this process looks like at the end?
I'm sure we probably don't want to just look at it.
>> Yes. Let me show you the documents.
Here is the sample document in English,
and here's the translated document.
I'm showing it side by side so that you can get a feel of it.
This Word document gets translated using
the service which preserves the layout
and structure assets in the original document.
Here you can see the headings, bold, are preserved,
and the table layouts are preserved,
and the highlights are preserved.
Not just a Word file,
you can also see the same document we had English file in PDF,
and we have same thing got
translated using the service into Spanish,
and you could see how good it preserved
the layout and structure of the document.
This is unique to our service.
>> This is my surprised face.
I didn't realize that we were also preserving document structure.
This is amazing.
Let's just say you have
some training documents then you put them on Word because that's,
I don't know, people do that.
You can literally have all of those translated,
send one call at the end
of your workday when you finish all the docs,
and the next day you could have them all
translated in whatever languages you want. Is that correct?
>> Exactly, absolutely.
>> This is impressive.
Where can people go to find out more about this?
>> This service is going to be public preview soon.
Currently it's in private preview with select set of customers,
and soon it will be open to public preview.
We'll probably link down this as part of this video session.
You can go there and learn more
about when it is coming and how to use the service.
>> Well, this has been fantastic.
Thank you so much for spending some time with us, Krishna.
Again, thank you so much for watching.
We've been learning about some of
the cool new features in Translator here on THE AI SHOW.
Hopefully, we'll see you next time. Take care.
>> [MUSIC].