Today was a big day at Microsoft. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, President of the Server and Tools Business made a special announcement at the BUILD! Developer conference, formalizing Microsoft’s long-term strategic commitment to their translation service. You can see Satya Nadella’s day two BUILD! keynote on www.buildwindows.com. Read the full announcement on the Microsoft Translator blog. Much more detailed information can also be found on the Microsoft Translator API Commercial Announcement FAQ.

Users that currently do not have a Bing API commercial license will need to sign up to use the service through MS Azure Marketplace. Click here to see the pricing scheme and signup details. Customers will be able to use the API for free to translate up to 2 Million characters per month. Pricing tiers start at $40 per month. Customers that currently have a commercial license will be able to use their existing setup based on their App ID until March 2012.

This move should come as no surprise to anyone. Running translation servers, training servers and developing high quality MT systems costs money. Why should companies give it away for free? In addition, developers flocked en mass to the ‘free’ Microsoft API after Google announced that it was deprecating the free Google Translate API. Microsoft saw a huge spike in demand and decided that it was time to cash in.

In Microsoft’s defense, I can say that their announcement was much more low-key and less deceptive than Google’s. First of all, MS did not promote their ‘free’ API as aggressively as Google. MS has had a commercial license agreement in place for quite a while now and has already signed up some heavy-duty licensees. AutoDesk and Facebook for example. In today’s keynote, Satya Nadella announced that eBay has also signed up to use Bing Translation API in their website. Additionally, Microsoft’s free limit of 2 Million characters a month is very generous and will allow software developers a lot of flexibility in considering the Bing translation API as a viable platform their products.

And while Google has been very high profile about their free translation system, they have not signed up any major software companies (other than Google itself) to use their translation system. By signing up some of the biggest names in the software industry, Microsoft will likely use their success in deployment of their translation API to attract more developers to use this and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft’s move, combined with Google’s recent termination of the free API service, will create more demand for commercial MT systems like Asia Online, Systran and Language Weaver. I also think that free translation APIs are history. Anything out there that is free is either no good or will not be free for long.

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