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Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music, or search for anecdotes. Millions of others are reluctant to invite powerful devices and their microphones home, fearing that someone will not listen to them.
Sometimes, someone is.
Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to enhance Alexa's digital badistant who powers her Echo speaker line. The team listens for voice recordings recorded in the homes and offices of Echo owners. The recordings are transcribed, annotated, and reintroduced into the software in order to eliminate the gaps in the understanding of human speech by Alexa and help her to better respond to orders.
The voice revision process Alexa, described by seven people who worked on the program, highlights the human role often neglected in the formation of software algorithms. In marketing, Amazon says that Alexa lives in the cloud and is becoming more and more intelligent. But like many software tools designed to learn from the experience, humans are following some of the teaching.
The team is made up of contractors and Amazon employees working full-time in remote locations from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to people who have signed confidentiality agreements that do not prevent them from speak publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, and each critic badyzes up to 1,000 audio clips per team, according to two workers based at the Amazon office in Bucharest, which occupies the top three floors of the Globalworth Building, in the neighborhood. in the future of the Romanian capital. District of Pipera. The modern facility stands out among the ruined infrastructure and bears no outward sign announcing the presence of Amazon.
The work is essentially bbad. A worker in Boston reported extracting accumulated voice data for specific statements such as "Taylor Swift" and annotating them to indicate that the researcher designated the musical artist. From time to time, listeners pick up things that Echo owners would probably prefer to keep confidential: a woman who sings badly in the shower, for example, or a child who screams for help. Teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help badyzing a confusing word or finding a fun recording.
Amazon in Bucharest
Amazon has offices in this building in Bucharest.Photographer: Irina Vilcu / Bloomberg
Sometimes they hear recordings that they find unsettling or even criminal. Two of the workers reported taking what they thought was a badual badault. When something like this happens, they can share the experience in the internal chat room to reduce stress. Amazon said it had procedures in place that workers could follow when they heard something painful, but two Romanian-based staff said that after asking for advice in such cases, they were told that it was not up to Amazon to intervene.
"We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously," said a spokeswoman for Amazon in a statement. "We only annoton a very 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.
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