One day in the not too distant future we may be able to communicate with anyone globally despite the language barriers.
We may be able to speak or write in our natives tongues with people who speak and write in their native tongues. This communication will be done seamlessly and without having to open up the dictionary. This is a vision that Microsoft is trying to make reality with its Skype division.
At the ingaural Code Conference taking place in Ranchos Palos Verdes, Calif., Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the upcoming technology his company is working on to break this language barrier. This technology is called Skype Translator.
It is being developed by Microsoft's researchers and engineers from Skype. It will use real-time speech-to-speech algorithms for translations so that users can have conversations in different languages, eliminating the barrier.
Microsoft may be close to making the technology available to the public as the company demoed a communication session taking place. Gurdeep Pall, Skype's corporate VP, spoke in English to Microsoft employee Diana Heinrichs, who spoke in German. Both speech and text were used for the conversation to take place in real-time.
Skype is available on all sorts of devices from tablets to smartphones and PCs. It will not be long before we can see this technology make its appearance in the Skype apps, however, it will be Windows 8 devices that get it first.
"Skype Translator first will be available as a Windows 8 beta app before the end of 2014," Microsoft says on its blog. "We've invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they're emerging as important components in this more personal computing era."
In late 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype, which focuses on Voice over IP communications. Skype allows users across the world to communicate over broadband Internet using voice, video or text. Users can even call landline phone numbers or cell phones from the service.
It will be certainly interesting to be able to talk to people from different cultures, languages and ways of life. Language often has different slags or cultural connotations so it will also be itneresting how that is taken into account. One way this technology can have immense potential is in entertainment. Movies and video games can be played across the world no matter what region of the world they are released first. ALl thsoe community-made translation requests and patches to companies like Square Enix can become a thing of the past.
Check out what Skype offers here for various rates and offerings.
