

How Skype Used AI to Build Its New Language Translator - dnetesn
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/skype-used-ai-build-amazing-new-language-translator/

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realusername
I would be really surprised if this kind of software could be used accurately
in any way. Especially on the vocal recognition part. As any kind of neural
network technology, vocal recognition needs a lot of training input to work
properly. As the web is primarily a text-based medium, this kind of technology
works very well in languages where the spoken language is close to the written
one (that's why it works quite well in English for example) but it's going to
be really hard for languages where the spoken & written forms have taken a
completely separated route.

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xnull2guest
"Pakistan may ban Skype in Karachi, citing use by terrorists" \- The
Washington Post

"Facebook, Gmail, Skype face Russia ban under 'anti-terror' data snoop law" \-
ZDNet

"Terrorists move to Skype, frustrate eavesdroppers" \- The Times of India

"Pakistan's Sindh Province To Ban Skype, Viber For 3 Months of Terrorist
Usage" \- TechCrunch

"Talk Like a Terrorist: Use Skype" \- United Liberty

"U.S. Jihadis being recruited by ISIS via Skype" \- NY Daily News

Among the first languages to get speech support: Arabic, Russian, Chinese. (A
full list is here:
[https://translator.skype.com/#/home](https://translator.skype.com/#/home))

Honestly, I don't know how widely speech-to-speech will be used (how many
people are trying to Skype with someone who exclusively speaks a language they
don't?). But I do know how speech understanding will bolster Skype, one of the
major PRISM programs. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance will gain a lot of
speed and drastically reduce costs by automating most foreign intelligence
collection.

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jameshart
That's brilliant deduction there. Among the languages to get speech support
are also German, Italian and Japanese, so the NSA also still has one eye on
the old axis foes as well. Then Spanish and Portuguese. wait a minute - isn't
this list remarkably similar to a list of the most widely spoken languages in
the world?

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xnull2guest
Cantonese, Italian, Korean stand out as smaller languages. Hindi isn't present
despite being the fourth largest language in the world. Bengali, Punjabi,
Javanese, Wu, Malay, Telugu, and Vietnamese are all more popular than Korean,
French and Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Persian and Turkish still more popular than
Italian, Cantonese.

I believe there is a win-win here. Of course Microsoft wants a feature that
applies as much as possible to its market (which appears from the list of
languages not to include Eastern languages outside of Chinese and specifically
excludes all of India). The US government wants as much foreign intelligence
as it can get, so it makes sense to focus on more popular languages.

Do you believe that speech understanding _will not_ be incorporated into the
Skype PRISM program?

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jameshart
"Eastern languages outside of China" \- except for Japanese and Korean, which
were listed. India has the benefit of widespread English use across all its
language communities. The lack of a widely spoken language like Farsi on the
list argues AGAINST your claim that this list is targeted to cultures of
interest to the NSA.

I'm just not sure I see any relevance to Prism at all here. Does Skype have to
offer instantaneous translation in order to permit multilingual transcription
of calls? No - if PRISM has that capability, it has that capability,
independently of translation being provided to users.

I guess you can argue that if people are using the translation service, they
will maybe speak slower, and repeat and reiterate what they are saying until
it is communicated clearly by the translator, so the quality of the transcript
may be higher - that's maybe valid, but obviously only applies to
conversations that are actually mediated by the translator. A skype
conversation in Arabic becomes no easier to transcribe by virtue of the
existence of this service. Creating this service, in fact, potentially reveals
the extent of their speech-to-text capability - unless they have a greater
capability behind the scenes, in which case - again, what does this have to do
with PRISM? And if you approach this with a paranoid mindset, surely in theory
this technology makes it EASIER for non-English-speaking bad actors in
countries of interest like Syria to communicate and recruit vulnerable
English-speakers in the US, which strikes me as counter to the interests of
homeland security.

A more positive view of this would be that anything which permits easier
communication across language barriers facilitates global understanding,
trade, co-operation and cultural exchange, and that long term that is the only
thing which is going to end the cultural clash which drives terrorism and
global conflict. So in some ways, it would be nice if this was part of a long-
term US foreign policy initiative aimed at making the world a more harmonious
place.... but I think it's more likely that it's just a way for Microsoft to
expand the market of their product.

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iamleppert
Maybe they should use AI to block the non-stop spammers I seem to get on the
service that drained my account of credit.

