New Microsoft Teams apps eliminate an obvious advantage for Zoom

Live translation for Microsoft Teams meetings are now a reality

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A pair of new add-ons have introduced real-time translation functionality tovideo meetingsonMicrosoft Teams, closing the gap on rival vendorZoom.

The service is supplied by both Interprefy and KUDO, whose cloud-based translation offerings have been integrated intoMicrosoftTeams.

The integrations give Microsoft customers access to a large network of professional interpreters, who dial into meetings on request. Once a session has begun, users can switch between the original audio feed and the interpreter’s translation via a drop-down menu.

Live translation for video meetings

Back in June 2021, Zoom announced theacquisition of live translation startup Kites GmbH, which was brought on to help develop machine translation (MT) solutions that would allow users to communicate in real-time with colleagues from across the world.

“We are continuously looking for new ways to deliver happiness to our users and improve meeting productivity, and MT solutions will be key in enhancing our platform for Zoom customers across the globe,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering at Zoom, at the time.

Although this vision hasn’t come to fruition just yet, Zoom has also long offered the ability for human interpreters to dial into meetings via a feature called Simultaneous Interpretations.

Until recently, Microsoft has been able to offer neither machine-based nor human translation, but the integration of Interprefy and KUDO into the Teams platform fills this gap in lieu of a first-party offering.

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“We’re thrilled to have been working closely with Microsoft in bringing Interprefy’s multilingual meeting expertise to Teams users worldwide”, says Oddmund Braaten, CEO at Interprefy. “This is a huge step towards inclusivity and accessibility of global meetings to foster cross-cultural understanding and collaboration.”

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Separately, but in a similar vein, Microsoftannounced earlier this weekthat it would open up its live captions feature to a wider pool of users in an effort to improve accessibility standards.

Introduced soon after the shift toremote workingas a result of the pandemic, the Microsoft Teams live captions feature is designed to ensure all video meeting participants can follow the thread of conversation effectively.

Until now, the live captions feature has been gated behind a registration wall. In other words, if someone was joining a meeting as a guest via a link provided by the host, they would have to make do without the accessibility feature. But this will no longer be the case, courtesy of an update expected to land by the end of April.

Update: Monday March 14

In an earlier version of this article,TechRadar Prosuggested Interprefy was the first company to integrate its live translation offering into Microsoft Teams.

We have since been made aware that a rival service, KUDO, was integrated natively into the collaboration platform last November.

Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He’s responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.

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