Microsoft Translator will soon be able to translate multi-lingual group conversations in real-time

At its Future Decoded event in London, Microsoft today announced a major new feature coming to its Translator service in the near-future. The company says that its Translator app will soon be able to translate multi-lingual group conversations in real-time which is quite fantastic.

At the event, Microsoft demoed a prototype of the app powered by Microsoft Translator where the app was able to translate a conversation between three people speaking three different languages (English, French, and German) in real-time. Olivier Fortana, the Director of Product Strategy for Microsoft Translator sated:

“The idea is to say ‘Everybody has a smart device, a smartphone or a tablet. What if we could harness the power of those smart devices to enable real-time, multilingual conversation translation for an in-person situation?’,”

Microsoft announced that a preview of this new capability will be available later this year, which will support 9 spoken languages and 60 languages for text translations. The company stated that it is actively working on improving the speech recognition used in this feature, and it’s also working on adding support for more languages.

This is quite an impressive feature for Microsoft Translator, and if Microsoft integrates this feature into Skype in the near-future, multi-lingual group calls in Skype should become much easier to work with. Additionally, it will also be awesome if real-time translation for multi-lingual group conversations works offline.