Skype voice Translator is marketed by Microsoft in glowing terms as the machine learning (ML) “language translator that keeps getting smarter.” 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. Except that a Motherboard story quoting an unnamed Skype insider has claimed that the reason it’s so good is really because it uses human beings to help the system’s translations along by listening to snippets of real calls.

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