Microsoft skype translator and customer service

Microsoft skype translator and customer service software#

Many fret that humans will be replaced by machines. ThatвЂ™s not MicrosoftвЂ™s fault вЂ“ but it does show that not everything can be solved by turning on lots of budding HALs and leaving them to it. Machines are being used to do lots of useful and clever things, but machine learning needs to be taught, and that requires teachers. Not a good few weeks for voice-driven AI then. Other files appeared to suggest that, as with Google, Apple and Amazon, audio from MicrosoftвЂ™s voice assistant Cortana is also being listened to by contractors. Motherboard says it was sent audio gathered by Translator featuring all sorts of personal content, including people discussing relationships and weight loss. Of course, this fails to explain who or what is doing the correcting. To help the technology learn and grow, we verify the automatic translations and feed any corrections back into the system, to build more performant services.

Microsoft says as much in its Translator privacy FAQ, describing how:

While Skype Translator depends on ML for the bulk of its heavy lifting, the algorithms used still need a lot of adjustment to improve their accuracy. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Luxembourg, Skype is a division of Microsoft Corp. They wonвЂ™t be hard to find hundreds of millions of people are already using Skype to do all sorts of things together. Suddenly, big tech companies are struggling to explain whatвЂ™s really going on without sounding as if theyвЂ™re trying to explain away privacy concerns вЂ“ which simply makes people even more suspicious. Try Skype out today and start adding your friends, family and colleagues. Last week, Google and Apple had to suspend contractor access to voice commands captured by Siri and Google Assistant after an outcry at the privacy implications of allowing strangers to listen to recordings of personal audio.Д®arlier this week, Amazon found itself вЂњin discussionвЂќ with the EUвЂ™s Luxembourg privacy regulator over possible privacy implications from access to Alexa voice recordings. Humans, meanwhile, introduce a very different set of possibilities.

Microsoft skype translator and customer service software#

Machines are just software and in their current state of development are (we hope) unlikely to have any personal opinions on what they listen to. The problem? While Microsoft makes clear that audio captured using this system might be analysed, it doesnвЂ™t make clear that this is being done by people as well as machines. Its reputation for accurately translating in near real time between ten languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian) is strong thanks, it might reasonably be assumed, to all that machine learning going on in the background.Д®xcept that a Motherboard story quoting an unnamed Skype insider has claimed that the reason itвЂ™s so good is really because it uses human beings to help the systemвЂ™s translations along by listening to snippets of real calls. Skype voice Translator is marketed by Microsoft in glowing terms as the machine learning (ML) вЂњlanguage translator that keeps getting smarter.вЂќ