Microsoft is making another bid to get users to switch over to its Edge browser by adding a live video translation feature. With it, the browser will be able to dub and subtitle videos in real time from popular services like YouTube, LinkedIn, Coursera, and others.
The company announced the cool new feature for its Edge browser during its Microsoft Build 2024 conference. As with so many new Microsoft products, the new feature relies on AI to perform its task. Basically, the new AI-powered feature can translate spoken content into certain languages as it's being watched.
The feature is still in its infancy, so not many languages are supported. Right now, it works with Spanish to English, English to German, English to Hindi, English to Italian, English to Russian, and English to Spanish. While the language pool is limited, it serves as a compelling proof of concept that Microsoft will likely expand with more languages in the future. In fact, the company has already said it plans to add more tongues as time goes on.
In addition to the popular video services mentioned previously, Microsoft will also support video translations on popular news sites like Reuters, CNBC, and Bloomberg. According to Microsoft, the list of supported websites will grow down the line.
Another potentially useful aspect of this new AI feature could be allowing those who are hard of hearing to get captions for videos that don't have them natively. Many video players offer automatic captioning, but for those who don't, this could be a game-changing feature that could convince some people to switch to Edge. Of course, it probably won't be long before Chrome and other browsers roll out similar features.
This feature is just the tip of the AI iceberg for Microsoft at build this year. New AI features are coming to all kinds of Windows PCs in the year ahead, including new Snapdragon X-toting models from Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and more.
