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Smart speaker recordings reviewed by humans
Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps.
News site Bloomberg highlighted the topic after speaking to Amazon staff who "reviewed" Alexa recordings.
All three companies say voice recordings are occasionally reviewed by humans to improve speech recognition.
But the reaction to the Bloomberg article suggests many customers are unaware that humans may be listening.
The news site said it had spoken to seven people who reviewed audio from Amazon Echo smart speakers and the Alexa service.
Reviewers typically transcribed and annotated voice clips to help improve Amazon's speech recognition systems.
Amazon's voice recordings are associated with an account number, the customer's first name and the serial number of the Echo device used.
Some of the reviewers told Bloomberg that they shared amusing voice clips with one another in an internal chat room.
They also described hearing distressing clips such as a potential sexual assault. However, they were told by colleagues that it was not Amazon's job to intervene.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Friday April 12 2019, @07:59AM (3 children)
This is nonsense. This unholy trinity* certainly has the resources to sample people's voices planet-wide out in the open, knowingly, not covertly as has been discovered. Google sends its Googlemobile around the world shooting pictures for their Street View! What would it take to code up a "Would you like to participate in a voice-recording survey?" page on their respective sites? NOTHING! This is clearly them (all three) using their own customers as paying guinea pigs, with bonus points for further desensitizing the masses to yet another privacy invasion. "Privacy? That's so passè!" Extra bonus points for providing entertainment for their voice-analyzer flying monkeys.
And yet, it will continue...
*hypocritical as I use all three's products...for better or worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @03:13PM
Google only charges for their captive audiences when they know those people won't rebel because they are stupid. Look at the youtube subscription model price increases. People who "cut the cable" only to deliver the same content over the same cable are experiencing the same price increases--new boss is the same as the old boss, and Google is happy to make people think they are being rebelious by "cutting cable" while delivering the same TV over it...
Everything else is forced or free, for those people not so inclined to pay for the same stuff again. Street view's photography and one's forced participation is both captive audience and forced participation-- no one is a paying guinea pigs to get documented without an easy opt out--forced to train as a pig, yes, but no one shells out money for the betas.
Somehow, this makes it ok for many people and the government, too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Friday April 12 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
Seems like they could accomplish the same task by simply using anonymized data and a lot of us would be OK with it. Adding tricky bits to the training set is really the only way you can improve the results.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gtomorrow on Saturday April 13 2019, @07:37AM
Sorry about the late reply (life getting in the way) but, really? Anonymized data? Is there really such a thing? Those better versed in this subject than I can verify there's no such animal.
In second place where's the problem in asking up front, no covert anonymized-data-involved, "can we record your voice"? Just ask across "this great land of ours" to say (for example) "the cars are parked in Harvard Yard." I'm certain MILLIONS of people would happily oblige. What tricky bits could there be other than gleaning personal data? I'm sick of Google/Amazon/Add-who-you-will-to-the-list reading the newspaper over my shoulder.