How Skype Used AI to Build Its New Language Translator
wired.com
wired.com
"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)
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.
Related?
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750751
Essentially Microsoft wants the best of BOTH worlds. It wants to comply with government requests and it wants to win on the technological front.
Microsoft does NOT want to lose customers and their unique place in the market, however. It's going to be a very careful balancing act for them to both comply with US government requests and to maintain a veil of innocence to both domestic and foreign customers. So far the damage to their reputation could have been a lot worse and their PR has more than proven its worth.
I feel Microsoft is fighting on both fronts.
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?
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.