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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, Interesting) by gtomorrow on Saturday April 13 2019, @07:37AM

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Saturday April 13 2019, @07:37AM (#828903)

    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.

    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.

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