As a project, the Windows Live Messenger machine translation bot was introduced without much fuss in the summer of 2007. Since then the bot has evolved, and on September 2, the Microsoft Research Machine Translation team announced the availability of the new Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot. Fathered by Helvecio Ribeiro, SDET w/ MSR Machine Translation, MTBot is designed to deliver machine translation capabilities to Windows Live Messenger, enabling users of Microsoft's instant messaging client to go beyond linguistic barriers.

 

"This Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you. As usual, remember that machine translation isn’t perfect – slang especially will give the engine trouble. You can also access Windows Live Messenger on your smartphone to use the bot to translate simple sentences while you’re traveling to other countries," revealed a representative of the MSR-MT team.

 

Of course that the Windows Live Messenger translation bot is intimately connected with the Translator initiative debuted under the Windows Live brand umbrella, in the sense that the IM client and the online service make use of the same machine translation engine. The bot also comes with a few option that will be displayed to end users via the "Tbot ?" command. As it is the case for Windows Live Translator, Microsoft is promising that additional language pairs will be introduced in the future, but failed to offer any details.

 

"The translator bot is localized into all of the languages for which we have translation support on www.windowslivetranslator.com: English to/from: Arabic; Chinese Simplified; Chinese Traditional; Dutch; French; German; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Portuguese; Russian (RUS->ENU only); Spanish; Chinese Simplified Chinese Traditional," the MSR-MT team member added.