One of the most ambitious projects from Microsoft, Skype Translator, will be celebrating its first birthday next week and to commemorate the event, it’ll be adding speech-to-speech support for one more language. Currently, Skype Translator supports six spoken languages which include Mandarin, English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
“With Brazilian Portuguese as one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, today’s news is yet another step in Skype’s mission to help people connect through conversation simply and easily, regardless of where you are in the world, and what language you speak,” wrote the Skype team in the official blog post.
Skype Translator is essentially a real-time translator, which now comes integrated with the messaging client in Windows 10 desktops. It allows near voice translation between different languages in real-time. Hence, a spoken conversation happening between a Mandarin speaking and an English speaker user will be automatically translated by Skype Translator in their respective native languages, that too in real-time.
Apart from these spoken languages, the real-time translation feature also offers support for 50 different messaging languages. The messaging feature in Skype Translator allows users to translate ‘one-on-one voice or video chats in real-time, simultaneously in both directions. While there’s also an option to only hear or view the transcript available at the user’s disposal.
Skype Translator arrived on Windows desktops last month, and currently supports Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10, though Microsoft notes that it might take a while before it arrives on other platforms which include OS X, Android, iOS and other Skype apps.
