The Skype service, owned by Microsoft, will soon acquire one very useful and very high-tech feature - a voice translator that allows people to communicate in different languages from different countries. Speaking at the Code Conference, Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella revealed an early version of Skype Translator, a service that uses new technologies and is meant for translating voice messages "almost in real time."
“We want to create a service that translates voice messages almost from the very beginning of your conversation,” Nadella shared before he showed an early version of the prototype of this software, the beta version of which will go publicly this year commercial product for the next two and a half years.
Yes, the new function, according to Satya, may well be paid, but according to the head of Microsoft, it is already good enough to work in the English-German language pair (and back). In the future, the company plans to expand the range of available languages.
After the show, Gurdip Poll, vice president of Skype and Lync at Microsoft, wrote in the company's official blog that Skype Translator would be available as a beta version of the Windows 8 application by the end of this year. In turn, Nadella stated that the task of the company is to install this application on all its products and devices.
The Microsoft Research website reports that the company has been working on a machine translation program for more than a decade, and at some point the possibility of transferring a live conversation via Skype "was considered an almost impossible task." Nevertheless, four years ago, the development of this program was given a green light, and the project began with the release of the application, which allowed translating telephone conversations in real time. At the same time, another project was being developed within Microsoft, the purpose of which was to improve the quality of speech recognition. Ultimately, this has improved the already existing speech recognition services and created Cortana, the virtual assistant to the Windows Phone operating system.
The main technology behind both the speech recognition program and the translator for Skype was introduced by Microsoft at a computer conference in China back in 2012. The version of the software showed the head of Microsoft Research Rich Rashid - the program in real time translated it from English into Mandarin.
It should be noted that Microsoft is not the only company trying to create a digital translator capable of translating live speech in real time. The Japanese company NTT Docomo has been offering digital voice translator from Japanese to English since 2011. Google is also working in this direction and is trying to introduce a similar technology into its chat services, and also has been offering to use a text translator for quite a long time.
The article is based on materials .
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