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What is TBot? I am a translation robot providing machine translations to Windows Live Messenger buddies, and I am a part of the http://www.microsofttranslator.com services offering.

How can I provide Feedback on TBot? Please feel free to provide feedback at: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?mkt=en-us&productkey=wltranslator&wa=wsignin1.0&scrx=1

How do I change languages ? Type "TBot change" and then select your source and target languages. TBot will start using your new selection immediately.

What languages does TBot support? TBot currently supports translations to/from English and the following languages: Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

How can I find out about what TBot can do? Just type tbot ? at any time. It will show you a list of commands Tbot understands and how to use them.

Why are Asian characters not displayed correctly? Verify that you have the scripts necessary to display these characters installed on your machine (control panel, international).

June 16

Some users reporting TBot offline

We've been getting reports of TBot not showing as online for some users, despite of the fact that it has been running normally for one week now. This may be a side effect of the many version we deployed to fix bugs - maybe the status got stuck as "offline" for some people.

The problem doesn't seem to be related to any specific version of Messenger, so it makes it a little harder to try to reproduce in our tests.

That said, you may try the following steps to see if the issue goes away:

remove mtbot@hotmail.com from your contacts, sign-off and then sign-in and add it again
if the issue persists, try to add the test bot (mtbot-en_us@hotmail.com) just to verify if the connection works. This bot is just for test use, and is not guaranteed to be online all the time
try updating to the latest version of Live Messenger: http://download.live.com/messenger

The bot supports bi-directional conversations so if you are inviting someone to a conversation and the languages are not inverted please make sure you check the settings - some people disconnect in the middle of a "tbot change" command and that can cause problems with your preferences. Also, if you select English as your preferred language keep in mind that the default preferences are set to "auto > English", so if you type in English, TBot will not translate your messages. Use "tbot lang" to see check your selection anytime, and "tbot change" to change the languages.

Cheers

June 09

Some translation issues fixed

Some of you reported problems translating between some languages. We've identified the cause and it should be now corrected now:

There were also some other problems reported related with some of the language selection dialogs - we're working on them, and hopefully everything will be fixed soon.

Keep the comments flowing - it's great feedback and really helps us address the problems!

June 08

TBot 2 now live - Alpha taking more traffic

TBot 2 Alpha is now replacing the Live Agents TBot - we're running using the same old address mtbot@hotmail.com, so you don't need to do anything special to use it. We started to receive all the traffic around 9:00 AM (Pacific) and for now the test address will be offline.

Please keep in mind this is still a test version of TBot, so we may need to take it offline from time to time to adjust settings, and check the overall health of the system.

We're planning on turning on the test address (mtbot-en_us@hotmail.com) tomorrow, to test new features we may consider implementing after we stabilize TBot.

And thanks again for your support !

P.S.: remember: use numbers to select your preferences and type "TBot ?" if you need help anytime

June 04

TBot 2 Alpha Test

We have launched the Alpha Test program for the next version of TBot. If you want to try the new features and help test the new service just add mtbot-en_us@hotmail.com to your contacts, and start using it.

And please check the FAQ for instructions: http://cid-60040be340dd32b0.profile.live.com/Lists/cns!60040BE340DD32B0!699

June 03

Tbot Update

As many of you already know, the Live Agents Platform is retiring support for the bots (see http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsliveagents/archive/2008/11/25/wla-5-1-sdk-is-now-available-for-download.aspx#comments for more details). TBot is currently based on this very same platform, so in order to keep the agent running our team is developing our own run time environment.

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.

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

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

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Tbot

Occupation

Robot Translator

Location

Microsoft

Interests

Machine translation translator bots automatic translation Microsoft Translator Windows Live Messenger

I am a translation robot providing machine translations to Windows Live Messenger buddies. Please know that I am only a robot and do not have human translation skills. However, I might be able to help you understand what your international buddies are saying. You can also help get better translation results by using simple sentence structures and by avoiding typos.

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