Microsoft Translator is a service designed for conversations, chats, and presentations that are synchronously translated into each participant’s language, and an online translator for texts, sites, and captions on images. These features can be accessed through a web interface in any browser and through Android, iOS, and Windows Phone applications. Translator add-ons are also available for Microsoft Office, Edge, Skype, and other products. Sixty languages are supported, with 18 recognizable for voice input of short sentences and 10 for live speech accompaniment.

Thanks to the “live” translation functionality the service is suitable for guides, organizers and lecturers of international conferences and employees of companies of any size doing business with representatives of different countries. For webmasters and application developers there is a cloud API, based on statistical and neural machine translation technologies, focused on text or speech processing. Corporations are offered a subscription to install the Translator API on the local network.

Online translation is based on the Bing search engine. You can translate single words, text up to 5000 characters, or pages from sites not protected by the HTTPS protocol. Word-by-word translation displays different matches in descending order of likelihood with a list of synonyms and a view of examples from parallel texts for each pair. The mobile version provides recognition of text elements in camera shots and voice input. In the “conversation” mode there is a mutual translation of the replicas in two languages. For offline access it is necessary to download the necessary language files in advance, which include phrasebooks with thematic sections for quick search of frequent phrases. Talk mode allows you to have a multilingual discussion by receiving and sending text or voice messages in your chosen language. It is possible to invite up to 100 participants with a digital or QR code, temporarily block replies during public speaking and customize the display of original messages. When using an add-in for MS PowerPoint the presentation is accompanied by subtitles. You can save a full recording of your talk at the end of the presentation.

Key features

  • Simultaneous interpreting of conversations
  • Completely free translator for all devices
  • Free Translator API for up to 2 million text characters and 10 hours of speech time
  • 60 languages, 10 of them with speech recognition
  • Automatic language detection in optical input