For years Skype and similar tools have helped us eliminate barriers and distances improving our communication in personal or workplace. Can you imagine that in the future will also help us communicate with people who speak other languages without having to speak them? It’s a complicated objective but Microsoft is already working on it as shown Satya Nadella, CEO of the company.

The technology of which we speak was presented at a conference in California and is known as Skype Translator. This new functionality would give Skype a system of automatic translation in real time, i.e. translate what we say and other say to another language and show it on the screen so we can communicate.

In the demo shown at the conference technology was tested with a person who spoke German and other one English. The results were good and although at the moment the translation is not very precise serve to meet the general context of the conversation and at least be able to interact with the other person. The technology has to be improving with time lines converge complicated challenge because of complex work as speech recognition or machine translation do not always get to be 100% accurate.

According to Nadella will be a beta version of Skype Translator later this year and will be available for Windows 8, probably with a small number of languages. In principle you can use for free but it could become pay as the number of languages and operating systems on which work is increased.