Skype now translates live into 7 languages

Skype has just launched a new feature that's very impressive indeed - live translation.

That's right, now you can use the software to chat with someone in seven different languages and you can make yourself heard. Think of it as universal communicator (for Star Trek fans) or a Babelfish (for Hitchhikers fans) except it's actually real and works right now.

Voice to Voice translation currently works for Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portugeuse and Spanish. And the text version includes 50 written languages. Here's an idea of how the live speech version works - this test was from 2014 so it's much faster now.