Question: if you were givin 1 million euro to make somthing what wold you make

Dimitar Shterionov answered on 14 Nov 2018:

I would invest it in a universal conversational translator – a machine translation system that is really fast and can understand a lot of languages at ones and can produce translations for them in many different situations.
There are several difficulties for such a device to be produced at the moment.

1. I would ignore the problem with the hardware at first and get a separate cluster with GPUs so that I can train the system. (Novel neural machine translation systems require such hardware). But I would also investigate whether a hand-held device can be produced to have the computational power to actually generate the translations without the cloud.
2. Data – while nowadays there is a lot of data, to train such a system for multiple languages is very ambitious. I would invest in research on how to combine multiple languages in categories and train subsystems.
3. The system should also learn from its mistakes but knowing that it has made a mistake is very difficult for a machine.
4. Situations and ability of the translator – whether the translator knows how to translate something correctly depends on the situation, the domain, the topic, etc. And sometimes it may be the case that the machine doesn’t know how to correctly translate something given the specific context. That is why, we would need to invest in an adaptable system.

But I think 1 million would be enough to gather a nice team and work for a year maybe on this topic and develop this type of universal translator.