Google resumes human review of Assistant audio 'recordings' - 9to5Google:
Last summer, Amazon, Apple, and Google were criticized for not properly disclosing how human reviewers analyze audio snippets from each of their assistants. Google in response paused the practice for Assistant and other products, but is now resuming and making audio recordings entirely opt-in.
As noted by The Verge, Google is sending out a somewhat confusing email about how it "recently updated settings for voice and audio recordings." The crux is how the company is having human reviewers analyze audio snippets again.
This process — which involves listening, transcribing, and annotating — improves Google's speech recognition technology, and helps expand support to more languages. As of last year, only 0.2 percent of all snippets are reviewed by humans.
These language experts review and transcribe a small set of queries to help us better understand those languages. This is a critical part of the process of building speech technology, and is necessary to creating products like the Google Assistant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday August 08 2020, @02:18AM (4 children)
Sigh. People STILL use these things?
I'd ask when people would get a clue, but I know that is never going to happen. I'm ready for one of those one way trips to Mars.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday August 08 2020, @02:35AM
Yeah, I'm sure you'll want to spend the rest of your life playing bridge and singing karaoke with Tom Arnold and Rosie O'Donnell
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Saturday August 08 2020, @03:15AM (2 children)
What really irritates me is many of these bits of tech that work by constantly phoning home could probably have been written to run on the device's local CPU instead, given the power of modern processors. I'm sure the speech recognition would be far from perfect but I gather that's already the case anyway. OK, so if you want to search for information it will need to go online to do the search, but the rest of the time, it's so obviously an excuse to slurp the user's data. The map / navigation apps are another example. There are gigabytes of local storage available--you shouldn't have to keep downloading the same maps (I don't know whether any caching is implemented, but the apps don't want to work offline in any case).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 08 2020, @01:04PM
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/apple-explains-how-it-uses-machine-learning-across-ios-and-soon-macos/2/ [arstechnica.com]
Best case scenario, CPU, GPU, dedicated ML/AI, neuromorphic, etc. performance increases dramatically, and most work can and will be moved to the local device because of latency and other concerns. And you can do all of the cool stuff on Linux x86/ARM/RISC-V and interact with the cloud only if you want to.
Worst case scenario, just think of your favorite dystopia and combine it with teh Singularity.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday August 08 2020, @01:10PM
You have already said what I came here to say. More and more stuff is shoved "in the cloud" not because it is cheaper, nor because it benefits the end user, but because it concatenates your data to make it easier for them to mine and sell information they gather about you.
I guess this is what they meant by being in the "Information age", you get spied on constantly for every little thing, just in case someone can make some money out of it (and they always can, because at the end of the day, governments can and do pay for this information in the hope they can use it to control you, usually with "money" they just magic out of thin air, so its always a bargain for them).
> The map / navigation apps are another example. There are gigabytes of local storage available--you shouldn't have to keep downloading the same maps (I don't know whether any caching is implemented, but the apps don't want to work offline in any case).
Yes, it peeved me off as well, but I found a solution. I can recommend one free app, called "Here maps". It is the old Nokia maps from the N900 era, which was spun off into an independent company when MS took over Nokia, and now does mobile apps and in-car GPS units.
I find the maps good, and you can download them all for offline use (I got the entirety of Europe on a 32GB SD card with room to spare), and you only need to be "online" if you want the live traffic updates (and there is a nice big button to switch this on/off). The privacy policy says they only gather your location if you got traffic enabled (as that is how they get traffic data for everyone), otherwise it can be used with the device in "airplane mode" just fine.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday August 08 2020, @03:21AM
The article lacked some quantitative data so we dont know how many recordings there are, but lets assume its a fuckton of them. Each recording is broken down into several snippets, so that hopefully no one reviewer can hear the full recordings. The recordings their AI, or speech recognition system, can identify already doesnt need further reviews. So most of the snippet should be all the low quality garbled sounds or weird accents? Still if you have billions of these even 0,2% of them is a lot of them. I guess this is why they dont want to give us any actual figure of how many snippets or messages they manually review. 0,2% just sounds a lot less creepy and big brothery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @03:50AM
' Google is sending out a somewhat confusing email about how it "recently updated settings for voice and audio recordings."'
"Do no evil" to "we are weasels," as the nature dictated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @04:05AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday August 08 2020, @09:44AM
The thing is, they won't disclose how, when, and whose voice they recorded. What exactly are you gonna ask compensation for, if you don't even know if and how much of your voice was recorded?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 08 2020, @04:49AM
Alright - Bot calls in to hit on a nice sexy Google bot. When the meatbag overhears the two bots making out, what then? Is that an invasion of privacy? Or, does Google have grounds to fire the employee bot? Wouldn't that be prejudice? Bot lives matter too, you know!
Hey! Google!
Leave them bots alone!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @05:56AM
just likie hannibal lecter is only taking snippets of your orgns.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @01:46PM
So that would be two out of every thousand snippets. Or two customers out of every thousand 24 hours a day. Well at least it is less than the capacity that was authorized by the patriot act.
Funny how newsy's never really seem to convey scale correctly.