Skype Translator isn’t perfect, but it’s tantalizingly close to the creation of a Star Trek-like universal translator - or Babel fish if you prefer - that allows everyone in the world to communicate, even if they don’t share a common language. On stage at the conference, Nadella demoed a beta version of Skype Translator, which performed real-time translation of English to German speech, and vice versa. The real challenge for Microsoft – and every other firm in the audio translation field – is the high level of accuracy demanded in corporate, legal and other settings where big money and reputation are on the line.At the inaugural Code Conference in California, CEO Satya Nadella has revealed that Microsoft’s real-time speech translation technology will finally make the jump from the mystical, bottomless pit of its R&D department to a consumer product: Skype. Which makes sense in many ways, because there’s little money to be made in a free app that lets people sit in their bedroom and chat to strangers around the world. Chinese Mandarin is the world’s most widely spoken language (at least in terms of numbers) with China, Singapore and Hong Kong making up three of the world’s business capitals.Īll this could suggest the tech firm is confident it can one, day achieve, the standards needed of audio translation for high-end boardrooms. So Mandarin is certainly Microsoft’s most ambitious target language so far, but it’s a smart choice all the same.
However, Mandarin is completely distinct in terms of grammar, context, culture and ideology – not to mention vocabulary and writing systems! A sign of Microsoft’s ambition with Skype Translator Translation between Spanish and Italian will be much easier for the software, because of similarities shared by each language. However, Skype’s venture into Mandarin proves just how much of a task it has on its hands. It’s a hugely ambitious project undertaken by Microsoft, but audio translation has become an increasingly lucrative market for the giants in consumer tech.
It hasn’t been without its glitches of course – most notably an embarrassing stint of turning Mandarin into swear words -– but Skype is venturing into its first Asian language, which is no small feat. And while six voice languages barely put a dent in the roughly 6,500 that exist in the world, it’s a huge improvement on the two languages it showcased at launch. This is a free piece of software we’re talking about too. Microsoft itself admits the technology is still in its early days, but the progress it has made is an achievement by its own merit.
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