We may never invent a psychic time travel box that can help us understand any language immediately like the TARDIS, but the translation capabilities Microsoft just demonstrated for Skype might be the next best thing.
Microsoft isn’t the first or the only company to work on direct, nearly instant voice translation. But, it looks like they might beat other companies, including Google, to the punch with a built-in solution for Skype that appears to work incredibly well.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, showed off the feature yesterday at the Code conference. To hear it for yourself, skip about 3 minutes into the video.
To be fair, I only know one of the languages in the video, so it’s entirely possible that the translations are way off. Although, it doesn’t look like there were any foreign relations fiascos, so Skype probably did a decent job.
If you want to see if it works as well as the demo shows and try your hand at causing your own international faux pas, the translation app for Skype is planned to roll out in beta form for Windows 8 before the end of 2014.
(Microsoft via The Daily Dot, images via Microsoft)
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