Amazon has people transcribing your conversations with Alexa

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If you own an Amazon Echo Smart Speaker, do you ever feel that anybody at Amazon listens while you talk to the Alexa assistant? According to a Bloomberg report, it happens that someone at Amazon actually listens to recordings of your conversations with Alexa. The company has on its payroll a number of employees who are paid to listen not only to records of your interactions with Alexa, but also to write them.

Thousands of employees around the world are tasked with transcribing these recordings, adding comments and loading information into software. This is done to help Alexa better understand how humans speak; this also helps the digital assistant to more accurately respond to user commands. Although Alexa is designed to use algorithms to improve its performance and user experience, human employees of Amazon are also involved in this process.

Amazon uses these transcripts to help Alexa understand some of the things that the company's algorithms might not cover. Alexa has trouble understanding slang, foreign languages ​​and regional expressions. Apple and Google also transcribe records of users using Siri and Google Assistant respectively. Apple records do not include information that connects them to a particular user and are used to enhance Siri's voice recognition. Some Google employees listen to distorted sounds from some users to help the company improve Google Assistant. In addition, these records do not contain any information linking them to particular users.

Anonymous talking about the nondisclosure agreements they've signed, people listening to echo users' conversations with Alexa are both full-time employees of Amazon and consultants. Working in teams in offices in Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania, each employee spends a nine-hour day listening to more than 1,000 audio clips. Although this work is quite routine, listeners sometimes hear things like someone singing in the shower. And if there is an incomprehensible word, an internal system allows employees to share audio files with each other.

A recent job offer for Alexa Data Services in Bucharest reveals what the job entails. The ad notes that "every day she [Alexa] listens to thousands of people talking to her about different topics and languages, and she needs our help to make sense of it all. It's a big data processing like you've never seen it before. We create, label, organize and analyze vast quantities of speech daily. "

As you can imagine, recorded conversations sometimes contain information that disturbs those who watch the tapes. Two Romanian workers heard what they thought was a sexual assault. While Amazon claims to have procedures that employees must follow when something like this appears on a record, employees say that they were told that Amazon should not intervene.

"We take very seriously the security and privacy of our customers' personal information.We only note that an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order to: [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us to train our speech recognition and natural language comprehension systems, which allows Alexa to better understand your requests and ensure that the service works for everyone.

We apply strict technical and operational safeguards and apply a zero tolerance policy in case of abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that identifies the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with great confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to limit access, encryption of services and audits of our control environment to protect it. "- Amazon

Amazon uses transcripts to help Alexa understand slang, regional expressions and foreign languages.

Echo users can prevent Amazon from using recordings of their voice to develop new features. However, those who choose not to participate can still have their recordings transcribed in order to improve Alexa's abilities. And although Bloomberg has discovered that the records sent to transcribers do not have the full name and address of the user, they include the user's first name, his account number and the number of the user. Echo device series of the user.

Earlier this year, another report indicated that employees of the ring-tipped Amazon Camera ring manually identify people and vehicles filmed. Amazon says this is handmade to help Ring's software learn to do it automatically.

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