Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to test out Microsoft’s new software. The company paired me with Ignacio Horcada, a translator who, as Skype Translator had it, had previously worked “in a context of the species specialized in nuggets”—or, as humans would say, he used to translate web pages. Now, he helps correct Skype's translation errors.

I went into the call expecting a normal conversation, but soon realized that it was an entirely different mode of communication with its own set of constraints: Once I started speaking, the software waited until I stopped to transcribe my words in a sidebar and then speak them to Ignacio in a computerized voice. This meant that we couldn’t interrupt each other. It also meant that thoughts were best expressed in one- or two-sentence bursts, not paragraph-long rambles—a lesson Ignacio had clearly picked up from using the software so frequently, and that I was slower to catch on to.

Small annoyances piled up in the form of mangled meanings and misheard words, but I hung up on the call with a sense of Skype Translator’s promise. In light of its amazing premise—we were speaking different languages but making sense to each other!—those mishaps were easy to forgive. (After all, humans make mistakes too: A few weeks ago, Cleveland Cavaliers center Timofey Mozgov answered an English-speaking reporter’s question with 15 seconds of rapid-fire Russian, and didn’t realize his mistake until after the reporter’s intrepid follow-up.) Skype Translator will only get better; it depends on machine learning, a process that evaluates its own outputs and makes adjustments accordingly. It's what has enabled mapping apps and Google searches to improve as more people use them, and the same will likely happen to live translation.

For now, Microsoft’s focus is on how this technology would fit into the lives of consumers. On its website, in its promotional videos, and at live events, the company has been dwelling on what the technology offers average people: Students can talk to peers in classrooms around the world and travelers can sync up with locals before trips abroad. It’s not hard to imagine other everyday functions—as a journalist, technology like this drastically widens my pool of potential sources—but one gets the sense that there’s a bigger push into the business world being planned.

“Of course, the day our CEO showed it on stage, we've been flooded with a lot of interest from many of our enterprise partners asking about the business implications of this technology,” says Vikram Dendi, the strategy director at Microsoft Research. Dendi has been helping oversee the development of Skype Translator, and is not hesitant to note its current limits. “I would want to make sure that if we develop into a more mission-critical type of scenario, there is that level of capability and maturity [first],” he says.