Microsoft states in privacy statement that people listen to Skype Translator audio

Microsoft has updated some documents of privacy statements of its services, revealing that people sometimes listen to recordings from Skype Translator and Cortana. That wasn’t there before.

The Skype Translator FAQ, Cortana’s Privacy Policy, and Microsoft’s Privacy Policy now contain references to listening to recordings by Microsoft employees or companies that partner with Microsoft. “For example, we manually review short recordings of a small portion of voice data we have to improve voice services,” Microsoft writes.

Microsoft tells Motherboard that the recent uproar about listening to voice assistant recordings was the reason for making this explicit in the terms and conditions. “Based on recent inquiries, we realized we could better make it clear that people sometimes rate this content.”

Last week it turned out that Microsoft employs people who listen to recordings. This also happens with Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon and Assistant from Google. All companies have stopped letting people listen to recordings because of the fuss, at least temporarily. When listening to recordings, employees assess whether the voice assistant heard the person correctly and answered correctly. With that information, the companies want to improve the voice assistant. None of the companies made that clear in the terms and conditions.