I’ve been excited about the potential of Skype Translator ever since the preview Skype Translator app was introduced in May 2014.
Imagine speaking in English to your grandmother who only speaks Mandarin, and having real-time translation of your conversation. How great is that?
And with this week’s announcement from Microsoft that the preview app of Skype Translator now supports six spoken languages—English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish as well as 150 instant messaging languages—the potential of breaking down language barriers grows.
Star Trek anyone?
While the preview app is currently available on Windows 8.1 only and tablets, plans are for Skype Translator to be bundled with the Windows desktop application by the end of summer 2015. Exciting news!
Empowering People
The real impact from Skype Translator is how it empowers people with deafness or hearing loss and how it can benefit their personal and work lives.
With Skype Translator, they can easily carry on conversations with family members, friends, co-workers, and others. The conversation is translated in real-time and displayed in the on-screen transcript.
Check out the two-minute video of how the app impacted Ted Hart’s life at work and home.
You can learn more about how Microsoft developed Skype Translator with deep neural networks for speech recognition and machine translation technology.
