Useful real time translation, as opposed to the entertaining kind, has been a challenge for programmers for quite some time now, even professional real time translators working for the news or governments can get tongue tied.  That is what makes Microsoft's announcement about Skype translate so impressive, it can now translate Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish on the fly.  If you have friends fluent in another language it would be worth testing the translations to see what level of quality they have reached as well as the voice which they hear.  The Inquirer also mentions integration with Slack, if you know of any businesses which actually use that IM and voice client. 

Phone a friend today and see if you can get Skype to throw a syntax error.

"Redmond's also made it possible to integrate Skype and enterprise chat tool Slack, which perhaps means it's added hipster to the dialects with which Skype is comfortable."

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