Humans are wired to communicate, but we don’t always understand each other. Especially when we don’t speak the same language. But Arul Menezes, the Partner Research Manager who heads MSR’s Machine Translation team, is working to remove language barriers to help people communicate better. And with the help of some innovative machine learning techniques, and the combined brainpower of machine translation, natural language and machine learning teams in Redmond and Beijing, it’s happening sooner than anyone expected.

Today, Menezes talks about how the advent of deep learning has enabled exciting advances in machine translation, including applications for people with disabilities, and gives us an inside look at the recent “human parity” milestone at Microsoft Research, where machines translated a news dataset from Chinese to English with the same accuracy and quality as a person.