Skype will offer real-time voice translation

At a recent conference held in California, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a surprising new feature that will arrive on Skype before long. It involves real-time translation of conversations between two people who speak different languages.

During this event, a demonstration was given of a video conference between two people, one of whom spoke English and the other German. As they spoke, each in their own language, the application translated everything they said as if they had a personal interpreter.

It is quite impressive technology, although it will need to be tested once it is finally available to see whether it really works as well as it seems. During the demonstration, some audience members who speak both languages commented that the translation is quite good and very useful, but there is room for improvement. Nevertheless, it works perfectly well for holding a conversation with someone in another language and understanding the general gist of what they are saying, though always bearing in mind that the translation is not perfect.

Nadella announced that a beta will be available at the end of this year for Windows 8, and that this feature will subsequently be available for all the devices on which Skype can currently be used. This, therefore, includes OS X and iOS.

This feature will use the resources of Bing Translate, which is capable of translating 40 different languages, although initially the supported languages may be fewer, expanding over time.

Likewise, this feature will initially be free during the beta phase, but it may later become a paid service.

Via| Microsoft Blog