Thursday, February 10, 2011

Lync Conversation Translator

I'm currently doing consulting for a multi-national company with offices where the primary language spoken is not English. The entire company are big users of Communicator/Lync, so I often find myself IM'ing with people who don't speak English. For the longest time, I would type my conversation into Google Translate, hit Translate, copy the results into my conversation window and press Enter. I would have to do the same for incoming IMs as well.  Conversations were slow and inefficient.  I would often think there HAS to be a better way to do this.

Thankfully, there is a basically FREE way to incorporate a conversation translator directly into Lync.  The Lync SDK includes a number of samples you can compile so you can learn the ins-and-outs of programming in Lync.  One of those samples just happens to be a Conversation Translator.  Even though I'm not a programmer (although I did somehow manage to pull off the Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer), I figured I'd try my hand at some Lync programming.