Microsoft's Group Transcribe app offers real-time transcription and translation

Microsoft Group Transcribe On Iphone (Image credit: Microsoft)

What you need to know

Microsoft's new Group Transcribe app helps people with transcription and translation in real-time.
The app supports "several languages."

Microsoft today announced a new iPhone app that makes it easier for people to deal with multiple languages. Group Transcribe offers real-time transcription and translation for meetings and other conversations.

Available today through the Microsoft Garage, Group Transcribe provides real-time transcription and translation for in-person meetings and conversations. Powered by cutting edge AI speech and language technology, Group Transcribe allows each participant to use their own device, providing highly accurate speaker attribution so conversation participants can see who said what in their preferred language.

Announced via the Translater blog, the new app supports "several languages in over 80 locales" and is a free download for everyone.

To use the app, conversation participants start a shared session and each leverage their phone's microphone to capture a highly accurate transcript, showing who said what in real-time. With the confidence in the high-quality record of the conversation, users can skip note-taking and focus their attention on the conversation itself. Transcripts are easy to share or relocate after the fact.

Having your iPhone automatically translate a language is the kind of thing sci-fi movies are made of. We're still a few years away from the infamous Star Trek universal translator, but we're getting there!

Microsoft's Group Transcribe is available as a free download from the App Store right now.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.