Microsoft adds real-time translation to Skype
By Chris Lacey
Microsoft has just announced that very soon Skype will have the ability to translate voice conversations on-the-fly.
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They already demonstrated this by providing simultaneous multilingual subtitles to the webcast of its recent Windows 8.1 update and Windows Phone 8.1 launch.
The idea of speech recognition has been high on the agenda for Microsoft, says The Inquirer. It launched an equivalent to Siri at the same event, but translating speech is an entirely new arena.
“We felt speech translation was a very natural evolution of the text-translation work we’ve been doing,” said Chris Wendt, program manager at Microsoft’s Machine Translation team. “It’s an exciting project, and it became clear that adding this capability to Skype and enabling people to have translated conversations was the killer scenario to get this technology into customers’ hands.”
Microsoft will begin a limited rollout to Skype customers that use Windows 8 later this year, as they continually look for ways to bring people away from Windows 7.
This is a great feature that Microsoft is adding to Skype, and it should encourage more people to use it. They continue making improvements to Skype, and it should be great to see what the future holds for Skype.
You can leave a comment below with your thoughts on this new addition being added to Skype, and if there’s is something you would like to see added in the future.
[H/T: The Inquirer]