Microsoft Translator turns your words into spoken Japanese

You may want to install Microsoft Translator if you're going to Japan and your vocabulary is limited to "Konnichiwa," "Ohayou" and "Notice me senpai." The app can now turn your spoken words into Nihongo to help you get around the country. Translator can recognize a bevy of languages, but Japanese is only the 10th language its speech translation feature supports. That's right -- it now reads the resulting Japanese words or phrases out loud to make it possible to hold almost real-time conversations with native speakers. The other nine languages in the list are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The technology's end-to-end speech translation capability works by using two neural-network based AIs. Its Automatic Speech Recognition AI detects your words, then its natural language processing technology gets rid of all the fillers like "um" and "uh." After the machine translation AI is done conjuring up a result, the app's speech synthesizer reads it out loud on the fly.

Microsoft's Translator app is available for Android, iOS and Amazon Fire devices, though that's not the only way you can access the tech's Japanese speech translation feature. It's now live on the translation solution's website, as well as on Skype's real-time translation tool.