The feature is meant to help multilingual teams communicate and to remove barriers for deaf and hard of hearing workers.
The next PowerPoint presentation you see may have live captions or subtitles, as Microsoft rolls out a real-time voice translation feature to millions of subscribers. Think of it as an AI-powered Babel fish for the conference room.
The capability isn’t new, but soon millions more will be able to use it. Microsoft debuted Presentation Translator in 2017 as an add-in and will offer it to Office 365 subscribers starting in late January 2019.
Here’s what the feature does:
Microsoft did not provide details on the accuracy of the service, saying that it ranges based on audio quality, acoustics and accents.
Most of the big tech companies — including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Baidu — have some kind of live captioning or translation capability.
