

Skype Translator – How It Works - imarihantnahata
http://blogs.skype.com/2014/12/15/skype-translator-how-it-works/

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softdev12
I'm curious on what the uptake of this product will be. The tricky thing with
voice translation seems to be the high errors due to both first recognizing
the speech and then the errors in translating the recognition. It's seem that
it will be really difficult to get translation near the quality of pure text
translation, that only has 1 step. I'm not sure that users will tolerate any
grievous mis-translations. We'll see.

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andyjdavis
> It's seem that it will be really difficult to get translation near the
> quality of pure text translation

I am fairly suspicious of this new product given that text translation is not
exactly a solved problem. My wife and I travel a great deal so we have plenty
of opportunities to use google translate in particular.

Currently we are in Spain and translate emails to and from the person who owns
the apartment we are staying in. The understandability of the translations is
pretty variable. One or two typos seems to be all it takes to see it produce
something unintelligible. Also, the locals in the area we are in frequently
speak both Spanish and Catalan. I suspect our landlord may be throwing in the
occasional Catalan word because some words (that looks Spanish to me) go
untranslated or are translated to something nonsensical.

Every email of a few paragraphs requires five minutes of my wife and I sitting
with both the original message and the google translation in front of us
deciphering them. Occasionally we have to bounce "was this what you meant?"
emails back and forth with our landlord.

So yeah, unless their text translation is much much better than google
translate, if they are going to layer speech recognition on top of that, good
luck to them.

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jordigh
So the scary thing for me here is that Microsoft here is admitting to be
centrally storing all of your calls as "data" in order to improve their
product.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I get it that everyone wants all of the
world's data in order to build better software. The only NDA I have ever
signed at my current job is about confidentiality and privacy of customer
data. Not software though, yay! That's why I can still share my GNU Octave and
Mercurial code with the whole world!

At the same time, I think it's almost fundamentally impossible to truly
anonymise data without rendering that data useless for the very purpose it
serves. All of these randomised IDs are just privacy theatre, to adapt a
phrase from Bruce Schneier. The same machine learning tools that can help you
use speech data to improve translation can be used to deanonymise this data.

Our science fiction writings are full of how we are going to build intelligent
machines that would one day control us and destroy us when they become evil. I
think that narrative may need to be adapted so that instead of instead of
intelligent killer robots, we have intelligent killer data in the hands of
evil humans.

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Someone1234
> So the scary thing for me here is that Microsoft here is admitting to be
> centrally storing all of your calls as "data" in order to improve their
> product.

They don't admit to doing it historically, they say that if you sign up to the
preview that they will use your conversations to improve the product going
forward.

