- Microsoft skype translator in which countries windows 8.1#
- Microsoft skype translator in which countries code#
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Microsoft skype translator in which countries windows 8.1#
It will, however, be a little while before we’re calling our cousins in Italy and saying in their native tongue, “ Come stai amico mio?” Skype Translator will appear as a standalone Windows 8.1 app later this year. Like other speech systems, Skype Translator will learn over time and its translation and speech may improve. No on-the-fly language detection, for now. This approach should be more natural.Īs for how Skype Translate knows which languages to use, you’ll set your preferred language in preferences. The alternative would have been to have the speaker hold a button while speaking and let it go when they wanted to deliver a sentence or phrase. The length of time it takes to translate is totally dependent on the length of the sentence or phrase. Moreover, the system is looking for natural pauses or, as Pall explained it, “silence detection,” in speech to start translating. While Speaker A is talking, Speaker B will actually hear their voice, at a lower volume, even as Skype Translator begins to do its work and starts delivering translated, spoken words. However, he insists that this is not a “tech latency problem.” The process can go quite fast, but since there is a video component here, the system works to make it all seem natural. This sounds slow, and Pall told me you do wait a little for the translation to happen. It’s then voice-synthesized into Speaker B’s language. The text transcription of Speaker A is then translated into the language of Speaker B. Skype Translator recognizes the words and actually transcribes them into text. Here’s how Skype Translator works: Speaker A starts talking. “The Skype community is big - REALLY big,” wrote Peter Lee, Head of Microsoft Research in an email to Mashable.”To make Skype Translator a reality, it needed great research to get the science right, and great engineering to make it practical and scalable.” Skype Translator, which comes out of Microsoft Research, is actually three technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech and machine translation. You’ll find the same technology in the recently launched Cortana personal assistant in Windows Phone 8.1 and in the speech recognition that been live on Xbox 360, and now Xbox One, for over a year. Microsoft is not new to the speech recognition game.
Imagine what it could do with built-in voice translation. Skype already, by Microsoft’s measure, boasts more than 300 million active members and handles roughly one third of international call traffic. However, our increasingly globalized society all but demands that we find a way to communicate across language barriers. By some estimates, it’s third behind Chinese (and all its variants) and Hindi. “No one else does this,” Pall told me, adding, “It’s the first time something like this has been attempted.” And it’s probably something we need.Įnglish is not the most commonly spoken language in the world. Then both parties spoke to and understood each other thanks to the live translation capabilities of the Skype Translator pre-beta.
Microsoft skype translator in which countries code#
Speaking at Re/Code‘s inaugural Code Conference (formerly the “D Conference”) in Southern California, Nadella and Skype Corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall made a Skype call to a non-English-speaking German friend.