Reaching out across cultures is getting a little easier, thanks to Skype and its new real-time translation service. The service has just added French and German. It had begun with English, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin. Those who just want to send text messages have an even greater choice of 50 languages.
The catch is that you have to be willing to let your conversations be saved anonymously so they can be analysed for checks on ways to improve the service.
The translations are handled completely by machine. Users have the option of hearing the translated speech as a computer voice or seeing it in text format. That means the service is useful for the hearing impaired too, notes Skype representative Yasmin Khan, since it will provide automatic subtitles to even monolingual conversations.
The translations consist of four steps. The speech is first recognized and saved in text format. A programme then removes the "ahs" and "umms" and divides the text into sentences. It's then translated into the target language, before being fed into a spoken language tool.
To use the service, it's necessary to have the Skype desktop app for Windows 8.1 or to download additional software if you're using a different version of Skype.