Anyone who has ever encountered speech recognition software will know it has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Yes, Siri still has some trouble understanding the South African accent sometimes and that’s irritating (and sometimes hilarious), BUT speech-to-speech translation software is crossing the language barrier in a way that has previously only been possible for those gifted in the acquisition of language.

Microsoft is not new to the speech recognition game. You’ll find the same technology in the recently launched Cortana personal assistant in Windows Phone 8.1 and in the speech recognition that been live on Xbox 360, and now Xbox One, for over a year. Skype Translator, which comes out of Microsoft Research, is actually three technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech and machine translation. […]

Skype Corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall made a Skype call to a non-English-speaking German friend. Then both parties spoke to and understood each other thanks to the live translation capabilities of the Skype Translator pre-beta.

“No one else does this,” Pall told me, adding, “It’s the first time something like this has been attempted.” And it’s probably something we need.

It is indeed something we need – especially in a country where there are ELEVEN official languages! Even for gifted linguists this is a lot and that is just when travelling around the nation, never-mind the increasing amount of international contact in today’s ever shrinking global community.

It will probably take a few versions to work out the kinks but if it works better than current translators as well as providing almost real-time translation this will very soon be taking over the market. Let’s hope they include some translations that will be useful for us here in SA for a change!

[Source: Mashable]