The 6 Greatest Software Innovations Of The Year

The Internet connected us all--but what good is that if we can't understand each other? Skype's artificial-intelligence-based Translator is our digital Tower of Babel. It lets us talk to anyone, anywhere, regardless of mother tongue. Made available on Windows in late 2015, Translator uses layers of machine-learning algorithms. When a user speaks, the A.I., drawing on millions of speech examples, analyzes the words and transcribes them into text.