Near-realtime translation of a Skype call has been demonstrated, and the facility will be available as a downloadable app before the end of this year.
Gurdeep Pall, corporate vice-president of Skype and Lync at Microsoft, writes in his corporate blog how he demonstrated the technology on stage at last week’s Code Conference, in a conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“Imagine in the very near future technology allowing humans to bridge geographic and language boundaries to connect mind to mind and heart to heart in ways never before possible,” he writes.
“For more than a decade, Skype has brought people together to make progress on what matters to them. Today, we have more than 300-million connected users each month, and more than 2-billion minutes of conversation a day as
Skype breaks down communications barriers by delivering voice and video across a number of devices, from PCs and tablets, to smartphones and TVs.
“But language barriers have been a blocker to productivity and human connection. Skype Translator helps us overcome this barrier.”
The Skype Translator demo showed near-realtime audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
“Skype Translator is a great example of why Microsoft invests in basic research,” Pall adds. “We’ve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they’re emerging as important components in this more personal computing era.
“It is early days for this technology, but the Star Trek vision for a Universal Translator isn’t a galaxy away, and its potential is every bit as exciting as those Star Trek examples. Skype Translator opens up so many possibilities to make meaningful connections in ways you never could before in education, diplomacy, multilingual families and in business.”
The Skype Translator will be available as a Windows 8 beta app before the end of 2014, according to Pall.
