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Skype to gain live voice translate beta feature later this year, will eventually hit all devices

Screen Shot 2014-05-27 at 5.54.24 PM

On the Code Conference stage in California, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced an upcoming feature for Skype: live voice translation. The demonstration showed a German speaker speaking to an English speaker. The English words automatically were repeated by the computer in German, while the German speech was automatically spoken back by the computer in English…

The live demonstration was certainly impressive, but German-speaking audience members noted that the translation was “nice” overall, but “not so good” in some places. The speakers said that the feature works for portraying the essence of the speech. Microsoft has posted additional details about the feature on its corporate blog.

Nadella says that the feature will launch in beta “later this year” and it will eventually spread to all Skype-supported devices (which covers iOS and OS X). The beta will first become available for Windows 8. Nadella said that Microsoft has data for 40 languages (which it uses for Bing Translate), but it will take some time for all those languages to become available for this future software.

Nadella was unsure if the feature would eventually become a paid add-on proposition, but it sounds like the feature will be free during the initial public beta period.

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Comments

  1. drtyrell969 - 10 years ago

    Innovation.

    • bjokl (@bjokl) - 10 years ago

      True, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. German to English translation was good, but English to German was horrible. You couldn’t make sense out of some sentences. Not much better than Google translate. In addition the computer voice still sounded very robotic. There’s still a long way to go: Keep on learning, neural net!

  2.  (@suttonmontreal) - 10 years ago

    great!! I hope FaceTime will add this too.

  3. Greg Novotravel - 10 years ago

    Impressive!
    …and love the way the girl talks ^^

  4. Tim Ruß - 10 years ago

    The translation German -> English was good, but English -> German was quite bad. Some parts had such a bad translation that I wouldn’t know what he said if I was her. I guess the whole conversation was planned and she knew what to answer.
    Nevertheless, I have great hope in instant translation for getting people together all over the world.

  5. Nils Goosse (@NilsG6) - 10 years ago

    Ridiculous how she had to pronounce words. She had to use here whole face to express herself.

  6. diaaattia - 9 years ago

    You can practice German by Skype with native speakers through this website http://preply.com/en/german-by-skype