Speaking Mandarin just got a little easier.
Microsoft Teams users will soon be able to converse in languages they don’t speak, thanks to an AI agent that translates speech in real timeusing the speaker’s own voice. A preview including nine languages will be available early next year.
This is particularly useful for businesses expanding globally and relying on remote work. Although written text translation technologies have been around for decades, including those from Microsoft, there is yet to be a champion of live speech-to-speech translation.
Microsoft’s New AI Translator Deepens Growth 18 billion dollars global interpreting market, but this could impact some 640,000 professional translators worldwide. Last year, Google teased a similar AI-based voice translation tool for customer service agents, but which has not yet been commercially released.
Microsoft’s launch is part of a broader set of updates to Teams, including the ability to translate presentations into 40 languages and converse with chatbots that simulate internal human resources and IT staff.