Microsoft Translator is a very useful service but little used service from Microsoft due to lack of exposure and exciting features from the company. However, if a single tweet is to be believed then we might be close to seeing Translator get more useful and more coverage.
Vikram Dendi has tweeted stating that this week at BUILD will be a big week for Microsoft Translator and that we should stay tuned to find out more. Dendi works at Microsoft Research on the various translation pieces of research. It’s an intriguing tweet and something I have, since reading, spent some time thinking about.
My first idea for what could be so big comes from a rumoured feature of Windows 8 that didn’t gain much exposure when it was first reported. (I can’t find any mention of this rumour now though but I am quite sure I read it somewhere.) That feature is for an OS wide spell checker but I wonder if alongside that there will be a OS wide translator feature too. This could allow users to translate text in apps, documents or web page automatically. That to me would be a pretty big thing and would tie in nicely with all the expected Windows 8 news.
The other idea I have had for this big announcement is that Microsoft will announce a retail/consumer version of its Translating Telephone. This was shown to be working about 18 months ago so I’d expect it to be nearly ready now. It would certainly be a great NUI feature to have on the Microsoft ecosystem and it would make sense for some NUI news to come out of BUILD. The potential for this kind of feature gets better when you think about how this could be integrated into Skype.
Of course the big news for the Microsoft Translator team might not be quite as exciting as real-time voice translation but could be a new API or something similar (although to me that news is not that big). What are you thoughts on this? Got any other ideas? You better be quick for all will be revealed within the next few days at BUILD.
