Very soon now, a select group of Skype beta testers will have a new Microsoft technology that seems borrowed from the world of Star Trek. It’s called the Skype Translator—a Skype add-on that listens to the English words you speak into Microsoft’s internet phone-calling software and translates them into Spanish, or vice versa.

As you can see from demos like the one below, it’s an amazing technology, and it’s based on work that’s been going on quietly inside Microsoft’s research and development labs for more than a decade. Microsoft is already using some of the text translation technology underpinning Skype Translate to power its Bing Translate search engine translation service, and to jump start the foreign language translation of its products, manuals, and hundreds of thousands of support documents. “One of the largest, published, untouched machine translation repositories on the internet is the Microsoft customer support Knowledge Base,” says Vikram Dendi, strategy director with Microsoft Research.

The translation machine intelligence is only part of the story, though. Skype Translate takes the words you speak, converts them into text, translates that text, and then synthesizes them into spoken words in the language of the person on the other end of the call. And that voice recognition component—recognizing your speech and converting it into text—has long been the trickiest part of the equation.

But voice recognition has come a long way in the past few years, thanks in large part to a burgeoning field of artificial intelligence research known as deep neural networks. Neural networks have been around since the 1980s, but they’re experiencing a renaissance. They hit the mainstream in 2012 when Googleannounced that it had used deep neural nets to recognize cat videos on YouTube. That work led directly to a big boost in Android’s voice recognition software, but behind the scenes, Microsoft was quietly laying the groundwork for Skype translate.

Watch the video.URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87pHe6mP0I