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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: 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.