For around a decade, Skype has brought people globally via computer technology. What would it look like if we could understand every language through Skype?
Microsoft is having a conference to enable technology to bring language barriers down the world over. That’s where Skype Translator comes in. At the conference, they showed audio translation between English and German, using a combination of Skype voice, IM technologies, Microsoft Translator and other aspects of network speech recognition. This may sound new, but Microsoft has been working on this is for around a decade. If all goes well, Skype Translator should be available on Windows 8 as an app sometime late in 2014.
If Skype Translator goes well, imagine how easier international Skype conferences will be. I was at a conference where Skype was used recently. We talked with people in an underdeveloped country and thank goodness there was a translator to mediate between us and them. But that brings another issue. There are many, many languages out there. Then add that to the many, many dialects. So will just the most spoken languages be used or will most or all languages be included? More and more businesses are using Skype. More people are personally using Skype. And more and more people are connecting internationally. So this sounds like a good and sensible move by Microsoft. How else would the world benefit from Skype Translator?