Speech-to-speech translation is gaining momentum. Now Microsoft has jumped into the fray and demonstrated German-English translation of a live conversation between two Microsoft employees. The demo was published by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.
Google was the first company to announce that it was working on speech-to-speech translation for mobile phones. A previous GTS blog post suggested that IBM and Apple may also be working on this exciting new technology.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft shows its muscle and in my opinion the demo you will see is most impressive. The conversation of the German speaker appears to be unrehearsed and it is translated into English, converted to speech and played back with a very reasonable delay. Seeing this demo, the concept of real-time translation of bilingual conversations appears to be very real and imminent. Implementation on cellular phones may be more challenging and therefore distant, but it is easy to imagine this new Microsoft technology working with Skype and other similar VoIP systems. And it will probably happen sooner than you think.
