Tim Heuer is really impressed by the Speak API so he decided to play around with it and created a simple application for that purpose.
One of the announcements that happened during the MIX10 conference was the availability of the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API. This is the engine that powers the translation behind http://www.bing.com/translate and some other Bing-related properties as well. A lot of research has gone into the engine from Microsoft Research and others. Language translation isn’t an easy task especially taking into consideration cultural significance of words, etc.