The days of being stuck in an international meeting without knowing what someone is saying may soon be over. Microsoft has just released a new app called Group Transcribe, which claims to translate a spoken conversation in real-time.
What Is Microsoft Group Transcribe?
Microsoft dropped the exciting news over on the Microsoft Translator Blog. The app is a product of Microsoft Garage, a special subsection where Microsoft employees can work on their own pet projects even if they have nothing to do with Microsoft or Windows as a whole.
To start, both sides of the conversation need to have the Microsoft Group Transcribe app downloaded to their phone. Both parties then join a conversation in the app, which handles all the translation.
Then, one side speaks so that their phone can pick up their voice via the microphone. The app will then transcribe what the person said in their mother tongue.
After the app has figured out what the user said, it’s time to translate it. Microsoft runs the transcription through its translation services to convert it into the recipient’s mother tongue.
It appears that the app will show both what the user originally said, as well as Microsoft’s translation underneath it. This is probably a safety net to prevent mistranslations from creeping into the conversation and confusing the recipients.
We can see that people can pair up by either scanning a QR code on the other’s phone or by entering a six-digit code from the preliminary screenshots. This may mean that you can send the code over the internet to someone else and talk to one another remotely.
Microsoft’s Push Into International Translation
If you’ve kept yourself up-to-date on all the Microsoft news, you’ll know that this isn’t the first time the company made a push into translation in recent months.
For example, Microsoft now offers full document translation via Azure. This automated service comes in at an affordable $15 per one million characters translated and claims to convert entire documents into your language of choice.
Combined with this new app, it seems that Microsoft is aiming to fill the translation niche in a COVID-19 world. With people now setting up their own freelance businesses from home, it can be tough for an individual to work with people overseas.
With Microsoft’s document and conversation translation services, a self-employed business owner needs not hire human translators. Just feed the data through Microsoft’s automatic translators and get a result in minutes.
Microsoft’s New Translation Tools for a Remote World
With COVID-19 forcing people to work from home, some have decided to use the time to start their own businesses. For those of you in an international market, it’s worth giving Microsoft’s translation tools a try to see if they make your life easier.
That’s not to say that Microsoft is the only one making translation tools. There are plenty of browser tools you can install that can translate whole webpages, for instance.
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