Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.

In a demo of the prototype software (starts around the 12 minute mark), Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, says a long sentence in English, and then has it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized “Microsoft Sam,” but overall it’s remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid.

In order for the translation system to do its work it needs about an hour of training, which allows it to create a model of your voice. This model is then mushed into Microsoft’s standard text-to-speech model for the target translation language. For example, Microsoft’s standard model of Spanish will have a default “S” (ess) sound, but the training process replaces it with your “S” sound. This is done for every individual sound (phoneme) in Microsoft’s text-to-speech model for Spanish. The creator of the software, Frank Soong, says that this approach can be used to translate between all 26 languages supported by the Microsoft Speech Platform, which covers most of the world’s major languages.

Once the training period is out of the way, there’s no reason that translation couldn’t be performed in real time on a smartphone, or near-real-time if you outsourced the work to a cloud computer cluster, like Microsoft Azure.

Now imagine this tech in a two-way setup. You speak into your smartphone, and it comes out in their language. Then, the person you’re talking to speaks into your smartphone and their voice comes out in your language. A couple of years ago, Microsoft demoed phones that could translate phone calls in near-real-time; you could call someone half way across the world, and even if you don’t have a common language you can still communicate. This technology hasn’t appeared in the real world yet, but obviously it wouldn’t be surprising if Windows Phone 8 (or 9) had it built-in.

Suffice it to say, a one-way device would be useful when traveling, but a two-way, Babel fish, universal translation device, a la Star Trek or Doctor Who would be something else entirely. It might also be exactly what the world needs to preserve the smaller languages that are being systematically usurped by heavy-hitters such as English, Chinese, and Spanish.

Read more at Gizmodo, or watch a video of Rick Rashid demonstrating the software at TechFest 2012

Updated @ 11:51: The voice clips that were originally included with this story were bad. To see the translation in practice, watch the video above, or download an MP3 version of the keynote; the demo starts at around the 12-minute marker.