Skype Translator Privacy FAQ

When you use Skype’s translation features, Skype collects and uses your conversation 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. To help protect your privacy, the conversations that are used for product improvement are indexed with alphanumeric identifiers that do not identify participants to the conversation.

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

To turn translation off for one user, click on that contact and uncheck the Skype Translator button which is just below the call button. To turn off translation all together, click on the Tools menu and go to Options/General/Skype Translator and uncheck the Enable Skype Translator option. When you turn translation off, your voice conversations are not recorded.

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.

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

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