Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Wasn't MSRA behind that amazing live English-to-Chinese translator [0]? It's interesting to contrast Google's and Microsoft's approach with ours at Wolfram Research (at 0.3% their size, of course [1]). We've come to see that it is very fruitful to live in a murky space somewhere between "commercial product" and "research project". I'm thinking specifically about Wolfram|Alpha. It's an enormous and daunting project. We've tackled a lot of very hard problems, and obviously have a long way still to go. It has the weird property of being a thing that ships every week, but not one that the parent company depends on financially. And so we kind of do our own thing, encoding domain knowledge, adding content, curating data, and designing frameworks, even if some if it won't ever make us any money (e.g. who will ever pay for dog vision [2]). We mostly just do things because they're cool or fun. But it's been incredibly useful to drive innovation elsewhere in the company. For example: 1. Alpha's unit system (the best in the world, the authors claim) is already in Mathematica 9. 2. Alpha is inspiring us to bring high-level semantic data and reasoning to Mathematica 10. 3. The automatic analysis in Pro is being souped up and will form part of Mathematica's predictive interface (automatic suggestions to "perform logistic regression", and so on). 4. We're working on taking the natural language understanding frameworks we've built for Alpha and using them to translate natural language querie