Microsoft’s Skype software will start translating voice calls between people today. As part of a preview program, Skype Translator makes it possible for English and Spanish speakers to communicate in their native language, without having to learn a new one. It sounds like magic , but it’s the result of years of work from Microsoft’s research team and Skype to provide an early working copy of software that could help change the way the world communicates in the future.
More: http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/15/7393665/skype-translator-features Sometimes, a dream needs but a nudge to propel it toward reality. That is exactly what Eric Rudder and Peter Lee delivered to Microsoft’s Machine Translation team about a year ago.Rudder, then Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, and Lee, head of Microsoft Research, had been among those who had seen demonstrations of a research project designed to provide fluent, cross-lingual conversations between speakers of different languages. The demos were tantalizing, offering the potential to smash through the language barriers that have hindered human communication for thousands of years.Rudder and Lee were convinced: The time had come to make it real. That task fell to, among others, the Machine Translation team, based in Redmond and headed by Arul Menezes. More: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/translator-052714.aspx