Slashdot Mirror
Ars Reviews Skype Translator
Esra Erimez writes Peter Bright doesn't speak a word of Spanish but with Skype Translator he was able to have a spoken conversation with a Spanish speaker as if he was in an episode of Star Trek. He spoke English. A moment later, an English language transcription would appear, along with a Spanish translation. Then a Spanish voice would read that translation.
Skype was never P2P, it was always connected through a central server. And the voice to text was always there, and will likely be how the NSA spies, as it's easier to search a transcript for "shiny bomb" than searching unindexed audio for the same thing.
The "new" thing here is reading the transcript real-time (well, real, after the translation is done).Voice to text is solved (not perfect). Translation is solved (not perfect), text to voice is solved (not perfect). This may be the first one to tie them all together, but doesn't break new ground.
Call me when Skype supports P2P connections, or IPv6.
Learn to love Alaska
It just so happens to have a video chat capability that integrates quite well into the Android ecosystem. It's actually superior in some ways to Skype, but (being part of Google +) nobody has ever heard of it - not even the NSA (?). Microsoft doesn't want to screw Skype up badly enough to force people to discover any of a number of alternatives. RIght now, the only thing maintaining Skype's dominance in video chat is the size of the user base. Force [Linux|Android|iOS|downlevel M$] users to find an alternative and that advantage disappears. Users are so damned fickle that way . . .