On availability: This has currently been rolled out to all English and Spanish speaking markets. Other language markets will follow shortly. You get the instant answer if your to: or from: language is English. In the English market, if the query is foreign, the translator assumes that you want it to be translated to English.

On when it shows up: The Bing Instant Answer will return an instant translation only for common words and phrases in common languages, using a fast lookup table. This table is updated with the most frequent queries.

If a translation is not found in the fast lookup, the Answer will produce a link to the translator site, so the user can click through to get the actual translation.

On size limits: The size limit of the query is the same for any Bing query, which I believe is around 1024 chars. The size limit on the translator site text box is 15K chars.

On language auto detect: The auto detection logic is better for longer sentences, and we continue to fine tune it to work better on shorter ones.

Feel free to post any feedback you have to the official blog post here.

-Vikram

If you are an attendee – our session is on thursday, but you will also see peeks at what we are doing all around MIX. Look in your attendee bags for a few surprises, including something nice for your laptop.

Stay tuned, and also check out the team blog for updates.

Here are the instructions to create such a USB drive:

1. Open CMD.exe (in vista – open it as administrator)
2. Type diskpart
3. Type listdisk
4. Type select disk # (# of your flash drive)
5. Type clean, create partition primary, select partition 1, active, format FS=FAT32 (or NTFS), assign, exit
6. Extract (or mount) the downloaded iso and copy the extracted contents to the flash drive. Setup.exe should be at the root of the drive.
7. Boot from the flash drive.

Long has a tutorial here as well.

Stay tuned for more.

If you don’t know much about Mesh you can get that here.

Problem Symptom: Vista fails to find drivers for devices – typically USB devices. Often these are devices that don’t require drivers (many USB keys and hard drives) or you have already installed drivers for them. After plugging them in you end up with a driver not found dialog box.

Quick Solution: Download this batch file (zipped version). You will need to run this from a command prompt with admin privileges. (Be careful though – usual disclaimers apply about doing it only if you know what you are doing and have backed up recently).

Detail: The reason for this problem (to the extent that it has happened to me) is that the driver cache for vista got corrupted somehow and the fix basically forces Vista to rebuild it.

Here is the breadcrumb trail of my search sleuthing that led me to the solution:

LockerGnome

Winmatrix forums

Technet (this helped in certain cases)

and finally Peter & Laura (many thanks!)

Nitty Gritty:

Typical error messages:

Error 1: Windows couldn’t find driver software for your device

Error 2: Windows Encountered a Problem while Trying to Install your Device

The last email I got from the man who I have often called my American dad was upbeat and full of energy – just like the very man whose office I had the good fortune of bursting into many many years ago. He mentioned as an aside that the cancer that he had beaten had come back but that he was supremely confident that he would beat it this time. About a month later, I got an email from his account mentioning that he passed away. Since that day I have been fighting away the sadness and trying hard to live up to the spirit of the man that inspired me to journey the road less traveled.

That day, many years ago, after I burst into the offices of the college Vice President – I had given vent to all my frustrations and my ambitions. I paced the room talking about my frustration at being unable to find enough time for research, and the paucity of student employment that hindered my ability to dream beyond. I talked about my journey from a small town in India to a small town in Kansas – and the temptation to give up. I talked and talked and through all of it this ram rod straight professor administrator sat behind his desk listening to me aptly and nodding to what I had to say. It was only when his office admin caught my eye from the outside that I realized where I was and who I was talking to. I skidded to a complete stop – unable to say anything further and expecting to be shellacked for being disrespectful. You see – I have grown up hearing "Guru Devo Bhava",  equating your teacher to God, in a society where teachers have tremendous authority.

I learnt my first lesson from him that day – as he calmly put into motion actions to create a new role within his office reporting to him and opening up avenues for me to engage in what little research activity that happened at small midwestern university. I learnt that day that action is the most eloquent of languages.

People were the reason why I could comfortably call Kansas my home, and Dr. Taylor was at the very top of that list. He inspired, advised and helped all he could and eventually encouraged me to make the move to Caltech. Along with a few others, he helped shape my future into something everyone would be proud of. He taught me how to start on the path to being a good strategist and it is to him that I owe much of my success as an approachable technologist. At the same time, I was very glad to play my part in his life – be it as the messenger boy in his budding romance or subsequently as a staunch supporter of mom Maria’s push to get him back to better health.

Even after I went to the west coast and they moved to Portugal – he and mom always wrote to me, emails full of wit and wisdom and warm benevolence.  When will you start your next company he asked – he wanted to invest in it. I had another home in Portugal they said, and a family that awaited my visit. Never did I imagine that I would not be greeted at the airport by my American dad when I finally visited. I will still go, because I want to see the land that he fell in love with and the lady that together with him nourished a young me with infinite care and amazing cooking.

Dad, I will miss you. No eulogies will suffice – you will live on in the lives of people that you have touched and inspired, continuing to teach and guide through your memory.

Dr. James S. Taylor (1947-2007)

German: Alle Ihre Übersetzung gehören zu uns

Arabic: كل جهاز الترجمة تنتمى بنا

French: Appartiennent tous votre traduction sont à notre

Dutch: De vertaling zijn behoren tot ons

Chinese: 您翻译都属于我们

So Mike, what do you think?

Having traveled thousands of miles from my origin point, I found that being multilingual was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Growing up, having learnt several languages while being mostly oblivious to that fact – I am astounded at how incredibly powerful our brain is. This fact hits home much harder these days – as I watch researchers and linguists in my new team butting their collective (and considerable) intellects against the hard problems of getting computers to learn how to translate natural languages. Millions of dollars and innumerable bald patches later – you get to where a polyglot teenager might still do better at translating the phrase “Tabbed Browsing” better than the engine (I doubt they can do it to such hilarious effect though).

There are some very clear benefits to getting Machine Translation right. The harnessable processing power available to us through computers is great and at low cost. To be able to use that to make large volumes of information available to everyone irrespective of what language they speak would be a wonderful thing is this increasingly flat world. The MSR MT engine has been very successfully deployed to deliver thousands of knowledge base pages to users worldwide. You can also see that technology in action when you use the checkbox for the “computer related text” on the Live Translator.

As the volume of information continues to explode, this is a great time to be betting on technologies like MT. Of course, such technology only gets better with training and usage and so I hope to use it whenever I need things translated. This is not that uncommon these days, what with strange error codes that Vista throws up from time to time being discussed and solved on german and other language websites. In fact, I have written a bookmarklet that allows me to get the translation of the current web page in one click (this one does english to french, you can use other language pairs as appropriate). Right click and add it to your Links folder (if using IE) or your bookmarks toolbar (on Firefox).

One great thing about statisitcal MT (which is what is used by MSR for this engine) is that it can quickly learn and translate in new languages. Maybe one of these days the person who fills (filled?) this role might want to contribute to the database.

Update: The official blog for my team is now up on MSDN

Update 2: I added a widget to the right that allows for translation of any page into another language. Give it a whirl!

Update 3: Translated now using the Microsoft Research Translation Engine

One of the easier ways to become successful in an increasingly flat world is to identify a new market that has deep parallels to a mature one – understand the deltas and trends really well and apply the lessons learnt from the mature market to the new one. With that in mind, I think recycling is going to be a HUGE business in India. If I were an entrepreneur or investor looking to make an investment I would make one in the trash and recycling business. I know of many stories where people made millions in this business in the developed world. The same story could be easily emulated in a place like India. I saw some smaller trash picking operations while I was in Hyderabad and there are some global trash companies investing – but someone local with deeper pockets and a good understanding of the human resource situation who executes systematically would be able to reap huge rewards in a place like India. Some interesting execution points would be to (a) lobby government to bring about trash and recycling laws (b) make big pushes in terms of creating a brand name that is clearly associated with trash and recycling (like xerox is to copying) (c) create a profit sharing franchisee model to tap into the large low cost work force.

Further reading:

French Garbage Company Disrupts Community Initiatives

India’s tech trash heap – .net magazine (I wonder what part of a computer has grease)

Garbage too can make you rich

Here is one such truly cool product from Microsoft: Microsoft Surface.  Lately there has been a TON of news around touch computing TED Multitouch demo, iPhone and so forth. I followed this inside Microsoft for quite a while (playtable), and I highly recommend checking the videos out.

 Engadget has a gallery.

Robert is covering it. Tell him what questions you have for the playtable team.

CNN has an article.

Nice long demo video on On10.

Techcrunch covers it.

Nice coverage and video on Popular Mechanics.