When you use Skype’s translation features, Skype collects and uses your conversation to provide the translation service. With your permission, your data may be used to help improve Microsoft products and services. To help the translation and speech recognition technology learn and grow, sentences and automatic transcripts are analyzed and any corrections are entered into our system, to build more performant services. This may include transcription of audio recordings by Microsoft employees and vendors, subject to procedures designed to protect users’ privacy, including taking steps to de-identify data, requiring non-disclosure agreements with vendors and their employees, and requiring that vendors meet the high privacy standards set out in European law and elsewhere.

Voice conversations are only recorded when translation features are selected by a user.

To stop a translated conversation:

1. Tap or click on the chat header.
2. Scroll down to Translate Conversation and select Stop translations.
3. Your translated conversation will be disabled, and a notification will be sent to the chat.

To provide you with a translated conversation, the content of your communication is passed through our speech recognition and/or translation services before being returned in your chosen language. Translation in Skype is new technology that will improve the more it is used. To help the technology learn and grow, we verify the automatic translations and feed any corrections back into the system, to build more performant services.

Microsoft may process Skype Translator voice recordings for product improvement. Product improvement may involve both automated and manual (human) methods of processing. We only deploy human review with your explicit permission. To build, train, and improve the accuracy of our automated methods of processing (such as translation and transcription services), Microsoft employees and vendors, with your permission, manually review some of the predictions and inferences produced by the automated methods against the underlying data from which the predictions and inferences were made. With your permission, short snippets of a small sampling of voice data that Microsoft has taken steps to de-identify may be reviewed manually to improve our speech services, such as recognition and translation.

Yes. Your translated conversation settings are device specific. This means that the permissions will not sync across all your devices connected to your Microsoft account. You will need to enable the setting on each device you use the translated conversation feature.

Yes, you can change your permissions at any time by changing the toggle in Translation settings to off.

Conversations using translation are encrypted in transit to and from Microsoft’s servers.

No, Skype doesn’t use the information collected through translation features to sell advertising.