Microsoft’s Skype Translator is an impressive piece of software. The service can translate in real-time between languages. It’s probably the closest thing right now to a universal translator and it’s been free ever since it launched. And today, it’s getting support for another spoken language: Russian.
Skype users will be able to talk in Russian and their speech will be translated in one of the other eight languages that the service supports. Translator was publicly launched last year, and since then the team has continuously expanded the language base that the service supports. As things stand right now Skype Translator can handle 50 different languages for text translations, and nine for voice: English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian.
The Skype team credits the addition of Russian to its spoken voice translation service to the countless Russian users that petitioned Microsoft to have their language added. The really exciting part here is that not only is the team listening to user feedback, but the system itself is getting better the more it’s used, in any language.
If you want to try out translations in Russian or one of the other supported languages, all you need to do is click on the Globe icon inside of the Skype conversation. Note, you’ll be needing Skype desktop for Translator to work.
Source: Skype