Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator is Microsoft's translation service, delivered both as free consumer apps and as a cloud API inside Azure AI Services. The apps translate typed text, spoken conversations, photographed menus and street signs, websites and whole documents, and they run on Android, iOS and Windows as well as inside Bing, Microsoft Edge and an Outlook add in. For personal use the multi device conversation feature lets several people join the same translated conversation from their own phones with live captioning, split screen translation puts two languages on one device for face to face exchanges, and downloadable offline language packs translate text without a connection. For business use, the Translator API and the Speech service, both part of the Azure AI Services family, add text and speech translation to applications and customer interactions. For education, Microsoft positions the same live captioning and cross language understanding for classrooms and for communication with parents. The consumer apps are free to download and use, and Microsoft offers a free monthly text translation subscription for trying the API. Paid business use is billed through Azure. The Azure pricing page publishes a free tier, F0, covering 2 million characters per month of any combination of standard translation and custom translation training, and a standard pay as you go tier charged per million characters for text translation, document translation and custom translation, with document translation of images charged per thousand images and hosted custom models charged per model per region per month. Custom translation training is capped at $300 per training run. The per character rates themselves render through the Azure pricing calculator rather than as fixed figures on the page. The service is a component of Azure AI Services, so business terms, regions and compliance follow the wider Azure platform rather than the consumer apps.