Who wants to see me puppeteered in French by an AI?

[andrewducker]

About 10 days ago I was pointed at this video of an "instant AI video translation" into French.  And, of course, wanted to give it a go myself.

Now, since it grabbed some publicity, the queues were huge, and I wasn't going to pay to jump to the front of them.

But I did record a 30 second clip, shortly before we moved out of our home for three months (hence the boxes in the background), and this morning I got a notification that my free translation was ready.

So, here is my original:

Watch on YouTube

and here is me "speaking French".

Watch on YouTube

As a note, I haven't spoken more than a few words of French in 35 years (although I did get an A at GCSE), and so I don't actually know how good a translation it is.  And clearly, you can spot enough glitches in the video to tell that it's not actually me.  But still, there's a certain level of impressiveness there.  And I'm sure it will get better.

Comments

[myka]

Je l'ai compris, mais j'ai manqué le son de la toux

[andrewducker]

And it looked very weird at the point where I did!

[cellio]

Yeah, that was very weird, listening to you "talking" when you clearly couldn't have been at that exact moment.

[rhythmaning]

Merde!

It sounds pretty impressive - though I'm not sure it sounds like *you*!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I was curious if it would have my accent. Didn't seem to.

[wildeabandon]

Yeah, to me that sounded like French spoken by a French person, except slower.

The translation wasn't perfect - the bit where you were wondering if "the translation would be smooth, or complete garbage that makes no sense at all" came out as "would be smooth or complete garbage. That makes no sense at all." But that was the only point I noticed an actual change in meaning.

[agoodwinsmith]

The thing it does instead of your cough is kinda creepy.

[benicek]

Yes that glitch was funny. Otherwise a fairly impressive tool. Thanks for illustrating with these clips!

[andrewducker]

Happy to - it was a fun little project.

[ninetydegrees]

Interesting! Thanks for making these. As a native French speaker, I can say it sounds pretty good. Most of what you said was translated accurately. There are only two big mistakes: at the beginning, it misunderstood 'to see how well video translation works' so it came out as 'Zol's video translation work works well' XD; at the end 'or whether what comes out of it is complete garbage that actually makes no sense at all' was broken down so the last bit was a separate sentence ('this makes no sense at all'). That being said, the translation was a bit awkward on the whole. It sounded a bit too formal and the tone of the IA was odd as well (like a voiceover for old instruction videos, if that speaks to you). It's not really how a native speaker or a good human translator would speak. Yet, at least :)

[simont]

Disappointed that the original mentioned translation into "another language" rather than French specifically. Then we could have seen whether the translation took it on itself to change the name of the language :-)

(A long-ago article by Douglas Hofstadter about self-referential sentences includes the example "Cette phrase en francais est difficile à traduire en anglais", the point being that translating it word-for-word into English stops it from being self-referential, so that something essential about the original sentence has been lost. Hofstadter contends that a better translation than "This French sentence is difficult to translate into English" would be "This English sentence is difficult to translate into French"!)

[andrewducker]

Hah! That would have been interesting.

You can always record your own and see how it comes out!