Friday March 29th, 2024
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Language Barrier Broken For All

Microsoft launches Skype's cool new feature: Skype Translator, ensuring that you can talk to anyone anywhere no matter what language they speak. We're not really sure why people would have friends who don't speak their language, but still, very cool!

Staff Writer

The language barrier has been broken. Egyptian youth everywhere are rejoicing as for the first time ever users will actually be able to have a conversation with their “girlfriends” living abroad.

The breakthrough announcement was made on Tuesday by Microsoft, who showed off their latest innovation Skype Translator at the inaugural Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The latest feature in Skype now allows users to speak in their language of choice in real time while the program translates into the recipients' preferred language.

The system hears words and does its best to translate in real time. However if the pronunciation is off or too quick, then it will supplement its audio translation with a display that shows a text translation ensuring that the message is not lost in translation.

Proving the feature works was Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Skype and Lync, Gurdeep Pall, who took to the stage to demonstrate the technology by having a conversation in English with a woman who only spoke German.

According to a blog post by Pall “Skype Translator is a great example of why Microsoft invests in basic research. We’ve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they’re emerging as important components in this more personal computing era.”

This statement explains why Microsoft was so eager to buy Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. According to Pall, Skype Translator will be available as a beta app for Windows 8 users sometime before the end of 2014.

This technology is sure to revolutionise the way we communicate with others. The only downside for Egyptians is that this feature may also lead to girls worldwide turning down Egyptian friend requests. Leaving Egyptian men to return to making up a fictional girlfriends who have no profile.