Skype has for long enhanced communication
possibilities with people in different parts of the world to through
video, voice, and text chat. Now the service is looking to expand those
capabilities by testing out a feature that could allow people who don’t
speak the same language to talk with each other.
Awesome? Yes, We know.
Today
at the first annual CODE Conference, Head of Skype and Lync Gurdeep
Singh Pall tested a new speech-to-speech translation technology that
Microsoft is currently working on for future Skype users. The feature
translates speech from one language to another in near real-time.
As
it was demoed, Pall’s speech was translated from English into text for
transcription on a colleague’s screen in German, and also into voice in
German… and vice versa.
At the conference,
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the feature would be avialable
later this year, and
that the company would try to launch it on as many
devices and apps as possible.
We await the arrival of this awesome feature.