Captain Kirk’s flip communicator, check

The USS Enterprise’s warp engines, nope

Transporters, nope

Tablet computers, check

Universal Translator – maybe

In Star Trek, it looks like this:

In the real world, it may yet look like this:

Disclose.tv – Microsoft has invented a working universal translator

That’s from Disclose.tv which shows Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrating speech recognition. We have a lot of that and some of it is very good, but this one aims to recognise the speech and then speak it back in another language. We’re a few years away from it being on our phones, but.