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posted by chromas on Friday April 12 2019, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the ceiling-cat-is-watching-you-masturbate dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday April 12 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday April 12 2019, @05:47PM (#828685) Journal

    Seems a bit easier to just not purchase one of these devices. A bit cheaper, too.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @10:46PM (#828774)

    Also, to spead word to others, so they also do not purchase.