At the inaugural Code Conference in California, CEO Satya Nadella has revealed that Microsoft's real-time speech translation technology will finally make the jump from the mystical, bottomless pit of its R&D department to a consumer product: Skype. On stage at the conference, Nadella demoed a beta version of Skype Translator, which performed real-time translation of English to German speech, and vice versa. Skype Translator isn't perfect, but it's tantalizingly close to the creation of a Star Trek-like universal translator -- or Babel fish if you prefer -- that allows everyone in the world to communicate, even if they don't share a common language.