Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced plans to bring real-time translation to Skype by the end of the year. The plans were revealed as part of the inaugural Code Conference held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

During the presentation, English-speaking Skype executive Gurdeep Pall called up German-speaking Skype executive Diane Heinrichs and spoke for five minutes.

Pall would speak in English, and after a short pause the computer repeated his sentence in German. Heinrichs would then reply in German and the computer would repeat her in English. The call was also accompanied by subtitles in both languages.

Skype Translator has been produced jointly by Skype and Microsoft Translator Teams and will be available as a Windows 8 beta app by the end of the year, before being rolled out to all Skype platforms.

On a blog post the accompanied the unveiling, Pall wrote that “weve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now theyre emerging as important components in this more personal computing era.”

Microsoft highlighted the possibilities Skype Translator opens up in education, business, diplomacy and for multilingual families. Skype currently has 300m connected users a month, and hosts more than 2bn minutes of conversation a day.
Chris Wendt, program manager of Microsofts Machine Translation team, said “Its an exciting project, and it became clear that adding this capability to Skype and enabling people to have translated conversations was the killer scenario to get this technology into customers hands.”