Microsoft has a really cool feature in the pipeline for Skype, and with a bit of luck it will be released in "preview" later this year. At WPC in Washington, D.C., they showed it off in front of 14,000 partners. If you were not able to watch the keynote this morning but would like to see the real-time Skype translation demo, we were able to record it while we watched the keynote.
The video was recorded at the Verizon center that was filled with 14,000 people, so there was quite a bit of ambient noise in the video as well during the demo. This ambient noise adds to the credibility of the tool as it can work in a noisy arena quite well.
The demo got off to a bumpy start, but for the most part, it was a seriously impressive demonstration of real-time voice and language translation.
Microsoft said that they hope to have this feature in public beta later this year, and the use cases for the tool are quite obvious; the demo was translating from German to English and English to German.