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.
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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.