Live Agents Platform Retires Support For Bots, Tbot Gets Own Run Time Environment

By Sunshine on June 3, 2009 12:03 AM

2 comments

Tbot, the translation buddy for Windows Live Messenger has to go through some remaking as the Live Agents Platform is retiring support for the bots. As TBot is based on the same platform, the team is developing their own run time environment to keep the agent running. The team reports:

This is a significant change, and it will take us time to get to the same scalability levels Live Agents currently have. That said, we’ll be starting an Alpha test period soon – we’ll let you know when we have instructions for this, as we’d love to have your help testing! Just be aware that interruptions will happen as we fix bugs and add more features.

We hope we can get the new version up and running soon, and meanwhile the Alpha Test version will be operating at limited capacity.

TBot v2 will have some of the new features announced last week: language auto detect and any-to-any translations. Also, some of the dialogs will change as the team tries to accommodate the new scenarios and language options.

The Live Search Translator has also followed suit in the Bing renaming and is now known as Bing Translator.

Still reachable at the same URL btw: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/. I wonder if this one will be remapped under Bing.com as the other services have, http://www.bing.com/translator does redirect to microsofttranslator.com at the moment.

Posted in News | Tags: Agents, Translator

Comments

http://www.liveside.net/members/CalumJR/default.aspx CalumJR

I find it funny that if you search “Translator” in Bing, Bing Translator is nowhere to be seen; at least in the first 5 results. In fact, the first result is Google Translator.

C’mon Bing! They really need to integrate the translator into the product with clear promotion that it is actually there. A way they could implement it is if somebody searches for a term similar to “hello in Spanish” etc or “www.google.com in French”. They could display the result in Spanish or French etc.

That is programmable and it would make a lot of sense. It would save effort having to go to Bing Translator, changing the language and typing it in.

One thing I’ve noticed is that te sign-in part of Bing Translator doesn’t seem to work. It re-directs the user to a really old Windows Live ID sign-in page and then when logged in, re-directs to Windows Live Account. Going back to Bing Translator shows you as not signed in. It also doesn’t recognise the market I have set Bing to (United States English), it recognises it as my actual market, which is ridiculous as they are the people who are not including the features they promised in my market.
http://www.liveside.net/members/Sunshine/default.aspx Sunshine

@CalumJR Yes, there indeed are problems with sign-in on the translator. I just tried and I got the exact same thing..redirects and not signed in at the translator :S
I did notice that I couldn’t change the market either. Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon.
I fully agree that the translator needs to get integrated more. It could do with a link under Explore on Bing too (don’t see why not). Bing translator was on page 2 (result 13) for me when searching “translator” on Bing!

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