Okay, maybe not a universal translator, but according to a post on CNET, Skype will soon be capable of translating up to 40 languages in real-time. That’s right: we’re getting a universal translator. But a new innovation coming from Microsoft might soon put an end to the language barrier. This article originally appeared on of the biggest hurdles to our global society is the simple fact that we all speak different languages. “We can get to it later,” Singh Pall said. For sure, it won’t initially work with one language that Bing Translate supported - Star Trek’s Klingon. “You’ve got to make it land.”Īs for the Skype translator, Singh Pall said the goal is to get it out there with whichever languages it can do well and go from there. “There’s a lot of ‘moonshot’ going on in our world,” Singh Pall said. Pall said the key is getting the technology out of the labs and into products. The Skype feature represents what Microsoft hopes is a turning point in the company’s efforts to make sure that its technological know-how doesn’t remain trapped in its labs.įor years, Microsoft has had trouble making its lab innovations translate into commercial success. Even if a tiny fraction of people were willing to let Skype use their conversations, it would get more data than it needs or could even possibly process. Pall noted that Skype handles more than three quarters of a trillion minutes of conversations annually.
Being able to use the real language that people speak would help the translation engine get significantly better, but also raises big potential privacy issues. One of the key things that Microsoft is still working out is how to use the massive amount of conversations taking place on Skype to make the translations better. Pall said Microsoft chose to let each person finish speaking so that people could hear each other talk before hearing the translation. “London is so international, you are going to love it,” Heinrichs said in German, which a female voice translated into English. The two discussed Singh Pall’s plans to move to London to join the Skype team.
In the demo Tuesday, Singh Pall spoke with another Microsoft employee, Diana Heinrichs, who spoke German. “Every piece of technology was there, but it’s never been put together,” Microsoft VP Gurdeep Singh Pall told Re/code. Microsoft Research founder Rick Rashid gave a speech two years ago in which Microsoft’s machines translated his English into Chinese as he spoke. Microsoft, meanwhile, featured a service much like the Skype translator as part of a concept video several years back put together by the Office unit.
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