We've tried Skyping in the past and the language barrier was a real nuisance for me. The entire Italian side of my family (on my father's side, obviously, given my surname) is here in the U.S., but my mother is German and all of her family is in Germany. The Skype team said in the blog post that it received a lot of feedback requesting Italian from people who signed up for the Skype Translator preview test program. The latter makes sense, but Italian was a bit of a pleasant surprise. Microsoft initially introduced it with Spanish translations, understandable given the ubiquity of Spanish in the Americas, and is now rolling out Italian and Mandarin Chinese.

Our long term goal is to translate as many languages as possible on all relevant platforms, and deliver the best Skype Translator experience for our more than 300 million connected customers,' Yasmin Khan of the Skype team wrote in a blog post. 'Today, we meet another chapter for Skype Translator on our journey to enrich the way we communicate with family and friends around the world. The audio comes out in a natural-sounding voice, instead of the usual computer-generated voice, and text is displayed in the Skype client. It takes English audio and converts it to the foreign language in both audio and text. Skype Translate is a function in its Skype communication tool that translates languages in real time.

We've all wanted something like that, and Microsoft is getting very close with Skype Translate.

It instantly translates alien speech into English and vice versa, enabling inter-species communication. Star Trek fans know of the Universal Communicator, which is a part of the Star Fleet logo worn on their chests.

Skype translator