Katrina Rippel is a careful speaker who follows all the rules. Hao Chen is a more freewheeling conversationalist. And I'm a nonstop troublemaker, constantly blurting out whatever notions pass through my head. On a recent morning, the three of us met in cyberspace to find out how well (or poorly) we could communicate in a mixture of German, Mandarin, and English. Each of us spoke only our native language.

It sometimes seems as if the highest praise an innovative new technology can earn is a credulous comparison to Star Trek. The Oculus Rift is like the Holodeck; 3-D printers are like matter replicators; Qualcomm is even sponsoring an X-Prize contest to build a working tricorder. And now Skype Translator, a real-time voice and text language translation app currently available to Windows 8.1 users as a public beta, is being widely compared to the "universal translator" that Captains Kirk and Picard used to effortlessly communicate with alien interlocutors. Skype Translator is less capable than that pat sci-fi analogy implies, but its limitations are as fascinating as its formidable technical achievements. Skype Translator performs instant translation of text chats in over 40 languages, but its marquee feature is real-time, spoken translation between English and Spanish speakers. Unlike Star Trek's fictional translator, Skype Translator is designed to emulate a human interpreter who acts as an intermediary between the two primary speakers.

Developing a universal translator means teaching a computer to think like a human. Developing a universal translator means teaching a computer to think like a human. It was early 1954 when computer scientists, for the first time, publicly revealed a machine that could translate between human languages. It became known as the Georgetown-IBM experiment: an "electronic brain" that translated sentences from Russian into English. The scientists believed a universal translator, once developed, would not only give Americans a security edge over the Soviets but also promote world peace by eliminating language barriers.

A world where there are no more language barriers might not be too far away - online, at least. Skype has released a live translation tool, allowing people to speak to others in another language - even if they don't know what they're saying. The tool translates speech instantly, providing both text and spoken translations. Washington-based Microsoft has released a preview of Skype Translator (shown). It lets people of different languages talk to each other on video calls.

The world is edging a little bit closer to Star Trek-style universal language translation, as the Skype Translator preview service goes live to select users on Monday. Skype Translator tries to offer real-time translation of both spoken and written communications, so that users who speak completely different languages can converse with one another easily. Right now, the service can handle near real-time audio translation between spoken English and Spanish, and text translation between more than 40 languages. As shown in the video above, Skype Translator will convert spoken English or Spanish sentences to text and display them (and their translation) in a sidebar next to the video stream. A computerized voice will also read the translated text aloud.

Microsoft Translator, recently made available in live preview, can translate face-to-face conversations in real time. The Translator is available through a mobile app or browser, and can translate conversations with up to 100 speakers, into 60 different languages. The announcement was made via a blog post from Microsoft on Tuesday. The tool can perform speech translation in nine languages, and it can translate text in more than 50. And yes, it can even work in Klingon.

Microsoft is expanding its real-time Skype translation tool to cover calls made to mobile phones and landlines. The software giant has announced that Windows Insiders -- those who have signed up to access early builds of the Windows operating system -- can now access the new features through the Skype Preview app on Windows 10. Skype Translator was first introduced in English and Spanish back in December2014, and it has since expanded into a number of additional languages, including Mandarin, Italian, Russian, and Arabic. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep-learning to train artificial neural networks, and it should continuously improve as it listens to more conversations. Essentially, it can convert spoken chats in almost real time across nine languages in total, and more than 50 languages in text-based instant messaging.

Sitting in his office overlooking downtown Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft's Fil Alleva is talking about the long and sometimes difficult road he and other speech recognition experts have taken from the early work of the 1970s to the situation he is in today, where he can turn to his computer and say, "Cortana, I want a pizza" and get results. The conversation quickly drifts deeply into the technology that makes something like that possible, and then Alleva pauses. "What we all had in the back of our minds, whether we say it or not, was C-3PO," he admits with a grin. The personable "Star Wars" character who can understand and speak millions of languages may not have been the only inspiration for the world's leading researchers – some also will say that the universal translator that was featured prominently in "Star Trek" spurred their dreams along. But regardless of whether they were "Star Wars" fans or "Star Trek" loyalists, one thing is clear: The quest to create a computer that can understand spoken language as well as a person was for years so fanciful that the only thing to compare it to was science fiction.

Katrina Rippel is a careful speaker who follows all the rules. Hao Chen is a more freewheeling conversationalist. And I'm a nonstop troublemaker, constantly blurting out whatever notions pass through my head. On a recent morning, the three of us met in cyberspace to find out how well (or poorly) we could communicate in a mixture of German, Mandarin, and English. Each of us spoke only our native language.