Try it – Easier Skype Translator Preview Access

Increasingly business is international and communications is a barrier. The Skype Translator addresses this and represents a great opportunity in effective business communications. 

As announced this past week, you can obtain the Skype Translator preview simply by downloading the Skype Translator preview application from the Windows Store (Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 preview) and then using it.

Currently there are four languages supported (English, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin) and 50 instant messaging languages.

Much like the machine deep learning which is the foundation for Windows 10 Cortana, Skype translator uses machine learning deep neural networks with statistical machine translation technology.

With machine Learning, you can train software by providing training data and the software becomes stronger the more it is used. This is analogous to the systems used with SPAM filters and credit card fraud detection.

The machine learning systems builds a statistical model and matches what is said against the model to do the translation. The more data and conversations that get analyzed, the better it gets.

Microsoft Research using machine deep neural learning networks pioneered the capability seen in Skype translator. In addition, they created a special bot acting as a third participant to provide the translation to the Skype call human participants.