РУСФОРУМ АВСТРАЛИЯ

Gurdeep Pall, corporate vice president of Skype and Lync, held a conversation with German-speaking Microsoft employee Diana Heinrichs over Skype, and their conversation was translated in real-time both through speech and text.

Mr Nadella said the Skype translate service could currently handle 40 languages. It would be available free to Skype users as a Windows 8 Beta app by the end of this year.

Microsoft is not the first company to attempt this. For some time, Google has been promoting the idea of a phone that would translate voice on the fly, and there are already apps that purport to do this.

If Microsoft’s implementation of it offers accurate translations, it could prove a major success.

In the demonstration, Mr Pall spoke in English and a male voice repeated his words in German. Ms Heinricks replied in German, and a female voice translated her words into English.

Writing in a Microsoft blog, Mr Pall said more than 300 million connected users used Skype each month, with more than 2 billion minutes of conversation a day.

“But language barriers have been a blocker to productivity and human connection; Skype Translator helps us overcome this barrier,” he wrote.

тьху блин, зря только языки учу

Просто разные люди говорят по разному, акценты все эти, диалекты, или просто дефекты речи. Это должна быть очень продвинутая система. Иначе ю-тьюб снова заполонят юмористические ролики наподобие тех, где смеются над Сири из ай-фона:-)