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Do you remember Star Trek and its futuristic devices and technologies? Well, even if we heard some rumors that teleportation would become a reality sometime in our lifetime, today we will talk about another Star Trek – inspired technology that is not only possible, but is here among us.
The Universal Translator is the issue, that technology allowing all people and all races to communicate with the help of real – time translating devices in order to break barriers and understand each other.
This technology is made available in our lifetime by two companies that need no presentation: Microsoft and Skype. Last week, during the Code Conference held in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and Skype’s exec Gurdeep Singh Pall showcased a
real-time language translation tool that has been built into Skype. During the demonstration, Pall conducted a conversation with a German-speaking colleague, with Skype providing real-time translation from German to English and vice versa. According to German speaking audience members at the conference, the translation software performed “pretty good” but not perfectly.
The news is great for all the 300 million people connecting via Skype each month for business or personal purposes. Imagine international calls and video conferences that don’t need a real flesh and blood translator, imagine business flourishing as partnerships among companies get to build fast and easy, imagine having the most pleasurable conversations with your foreign friends, each of you in your own language. The Skype Translator is going to be a big hit. According to MacRumors,
While Microsoft plans to debut Skype Translate on the Windows platform later this year in a beta capacity, the company says that it will expand to other platforms, including OS X and iOS, shortly after the Windows version launches.
So far, there is little data related to the number of languages supported by the Skype Translator, but there is hope they will be many and the system will function as envisioned. They will have to work a lot on this futuristic product, as the system will need to “learn” the languages at a proficiency level in order to become worthy for business. Moreover, there are some privacy issues involved that Microsoft and Skype don’t overlook and promise to take care of. It will also take them a while to fully integrate the Skype Translator into Skype, as for a while, the system will work as an individual app, with versions for Apple’s OS X and iOS, Tech Times reported.
We are more than happy to see that the collaboration between Microsoft and Skype works flawlessly and we can’t wait to have the Skype Translator at the tip of our fingers in the nearest future!
