A universal translator, eh? I wonder how long it will take for them to do pairs like Cantonese / Arabic or Turkish / Indonesian. Anyway, something like this, if it actually advanced to the point where it made about as many errors as your average human interpreter or caused slightly fewer misunderstandings than typically happen when people work in non-native languages, could certainly have an interesting effect on the market for language-learning. On the other hand, I am not sure that relying on a robot intermediary would be any less annoying than relying on a less than perfect understanding of your interlocutor's language. But I think one effect might be to create a sort of chasm, in that there would not be much practical point any longer in settling for a rudimentary or even lower intermediate understanding of a language when a robot could just do the job far better than you. So it might indeed have the effect of discouraging language-learning for those not in it for the long haul to high skill levels...who do make up the majority, after all.
There's a better video demo embedded on this page, The Guardian: Microsoft’s ‘Star Trek’ voice translator available before the end 2014
