Azure AI Speech vs. Trados Studio

This service is well suited for scenarios where you need to integrate text-to-speech and/or speech-to-text into applications. Within our organisation, it is primarily used by students for development purposes to enable said functionality but is also used to provide accessibility to students who have hearing-related issues. Its multi-language support is also beneficial for our international students who have English as a second language and are therefore able to rapidly translate any text or speech that they do not understand.

Incentivized

SDL Trados Studio is extremely well suited for expert CAT tool users. More novice users will have trouble getting up to speed. I have an office full of employees that constantly ask questions on how to do specific tasks, mainly because the task sequence is not obvious and is only uncovered by rote repetition of the same things. If you learn and apply the same techniques repeatedly, it becomes easier, but it seems the software was designed by software people, sometimes with little thought to the end users who have to figure it out. I don't know that professional training should be so necessary.

Incentivized

• APIs offered are very robust.
• Languages supported is far greater than most of its competitors.
• Integration with our custom apps was easy.
• Speech models that we created using neural voices were quite impressive.
• Translation services worked really well.
• Built in machine learning opens it to a lot more business use cases for the future.

Incentivized

• Extracting sentences from Word, PowerPoint, and PDF.
• Updating the source document when the client sends an updated source file.
• Comparing sentence by sentence old set of source/target translations made outside of SDL Trados.
• Maintaining a user community base to broadcast knowledge and issues.
• Having an aggressive product update frequency.

Incentivized

• More support for India regional languages and the ability to interpret Indian dialect.
• More detailed documentation with more coded examples to be available.

Incentivized

• I would like it to be faster. When I create a new project, even if it is short, it takes a couple of minutes until I can start using the file.
• I would like it to support more than 5 languages as, for example, I work with 7 different language pairs.
• It does not always accept the files after they were converted with OCR. It would be great if I could use Trados for those files as well.

Incentivized

Again, the list of functions is impressive but the way it is organized (not process-driven) and the fact that complex tasks should be close to basic tasks make the product suitable to hardcore users that have a lot of time to research the manuals and blogs. By the way, Nora Diaz is one of the most respectable users of this product. Her videos help a lot!

Incentivized

Support has been fast, precise and thorough. There is support on the web, by chat, by email, from the communities, from the experts, on the product Help section, on YouTube, and other social media. There is also a paid support for companies. This area is where the company stands out. I was not able to evaluate the support in languages other than English.

Incentivized

Azure Cognitive Speech Services is simple and the interface is not complicated even for those getting started with these customer services tools and the best voice recognition. Setting the platform dashboard preferences is also an easy process and with the ability to manage workflow and document management the system functions are stable and effective.

I tried using memoQ to get used to server-based localization tools, but experienced critical issues such as translation data not being updated on the server so stopped using it before I get used to it, unfortunately. It must be updated and improved by now, so I might try using it again in the near future.

Incentivized

• It helps us catch requirements and make notes so that we don't forget when drawing out proposals.
• Also helps us with targeted pitches and helps save time.

Incentivized

• As we have the license we can accept and take on our clients' requests without problem.
• Integration with other tools such as Xbench makes it very easy to apply our QA procedures.
• It is less efficient compared to our main CAT tool thus sometimes it can get time-consuming.

Incentivized