During a conference recoding what happened during yesterday, those from Microsoft they presented to the whole world a new system of real-time translation of video conversations Skype or Whatsapp. During the presentation, there was a video conversation translated from English to German and vice versa, the software doing quite well, without being perfect, but it was to be expected.
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
The entire system is the result of years and years of research and development, the company Microsoft still working on perfecting it for an official release. This research and development system assumed and will assume the analysis of user conversations in order to better understand dialects, jargon and everything related to the correct translation of any conversation.
Microsoft will start with a handful of languages and only for the Windows version of Skype, although Microsoft hopes to quickly add more languages as well as support for the many types of computers and mobile devices that Skype customers use.
Those from Microsoft intends to launch the system in beta version for users Windows during this year, a very limited number of languages to be supported. Compatibility will then be extended to OS X or iOS, but support for various languages will still remain limited as Microsoft wants to provide translations only for what it knows almost certainly will work well.
To be honest, a system like this would make Skype much more popular than it is now, but it remains to be seen how quickly Microsoft will manage to make it really useful.
