• Diyan
• On May 28, 2014

At the ‘Code’ conference yesterday, Microsoft’s leader Satya Nadella demonstrated Skype Translator, an upcoming feature that translates voice calls on the fly. Voice conversations between people are translated in real-time, so you can talk in native language, while Skype translates the voice to the other person.

Skype Translator has been developed my Microsoft and Translator team, and the feature will debut as a Beta later in 2014, said Nadella. Aimed to remove the language boundaries, the software should launch as a commercial product within 2 years. Skype Translator currently supports English and German, but Redmond will add more languages in the future.

A development version of the software was shown off at the conference. The demo showed English speech being translated to German and vice versa in both speech and captions. According to Microsoft, the feature will debut for Windows 8 PC, but the plan includes adding as many devices as possible.

Microsoft has been working on live translation for over a decade and the company already showed phone calls translation, while another project improved the speech recognition. Cortana voice assistant for Windows Phone 8.1 is a result of the hard work done over the past several years.

NTT Docomo and Google are also working on similar software. Microsoft however, can have a huge advantage in terms of potential users, as Skype already has more than 300 million active users.

Source: Re-code