Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator is Microsoft's neural machine translation service, delivering AI-powered translation across text, speech, and images in more than 100 languages.

For everyday users it appears as free apps and integrations across Bing, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint, and other Microsoft products, letting people translate documents, web pages, conversations, and even photographed text from signs and menus.

A standout consumer feature is multi-person live conversation translation, where participants speaking different languages join the same session and each sees and hears translations in their preferred language.

For developers and businesses, the same technology is available through Azure (Azure AI Translator / Translator in Foundry Tools), which exposes real-time and batch translation APIs, document translation, and customization so teams can tune translations to industry or company terminology.

There is also an on-premises edition for organizations with strict data-residency or offline requirements. It is aimed at travelers, multilingual teams, customer-support organizations, educators, and developers who need to localize apps, content, or communications at scale.

Common use cases include translating support tickets and chats, localizing websites and documents, enabling cross-language meetings, and embedding translation into custom software. Pros include very broad language coverage, multiple modalities (text, speech, image), tight integration with the Microsoft and Azure ecosystem, and enterprise-grade reliability and security.

Cons are that, like all machine translation, output quality varies by language pair and nuance can be lost, and the developer pricing model based on characters translated requires planning to control costs at high volume.

The pricing model is freemium and consumption-based: the consumer apps and light usage are free, while Azure Translator charges pay-as-you-go per character (with a free tier and commitment discounts), and the on-premises edition is a separate enterprise subscription.

Pricing changes often, so check the official site for current plans.