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Several sources talking to Vice said that Microsoft hired subcontractors to listen to audio picked up by Xbox One consoles.
The goal was to improve Xbox One's understanding of voice commands, but former subcontractors said their work also listened to them in personal conversations in cases where the Xbox One virtual assistant had been triggered inadvertently.
This practice has already been used by Microsoft for products such as Skype and Cortana and has been criticized as an invasion of privacy in both cases once the process has been made public. Apple and Google have also been criticized for similar practices.
In the case of Xbox, contractors who spoke to Vice said that the voice control system had been controlled by a person since at least 2014 to verify that the audio transcription was correctly transcribed, and that the system was working properly.
The practice continued once the Kinect-driven voice command function was transferred to Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant on Xbox in 2016. Cortana has since been removed from the console itself and can be used to control commands. Xbox via apps for Android and iOS.
"Most of the Xbox-related things I remember were obviously unintentional activations with people saying" No "to Cortana, as they were obviously in the middle of a game and were normally arguing," said one. subcontractor to Vice. Others, as detailed in the full article, say that the majority of the activations they listened to were triggered by children.
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