Here are each major service that uses humans to drop your voice commands



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All your vocal assistants are listening to you, as well as the humans who are hiding behind them.

A series of recent reports have revealed that the world's largest technology companies are using human moderators to listen to the recordings of users who give orders to their voice assistants.

This was a surprise to many users, who reasonably assumed that Big Tech's sophisticated artificial intelligence systems were handling all the dirty work. Many people thought that voice clips of a few seconds had disappeared into the digital ether after processing, that they were deleted or archived on a remote and blank server.

But this is not always the case, and users are not happy to hear that other humans are listening to them, sometimes even if they did not even call on robotic assistants. In response to the reaction, several tech giants have suspended the human review of audio clips indefinitely and others have issued statements downplaying the amount of voice content being reviewed by human contractors.

Here is a summary of what happened with the voice assistant of each technology giant and what you need to know about what is happening now.

APPLE

The Apple Siri Voice Assistant is a preinstalled software for iPhone, iPad, Mac, HomePod and Apple Watches. People carry these devices wherever they go, so when a whistleblower says The Guardian In July, when Apple's subcontractors had reviewed the records of orders placed by users at Siri, it was evident that the activities detailed in the snippets were intimate: drug trafficking, hookups, hospital visits, etc. . Often, users had triggered the wizard by accident. Apple said it sent only a "small percentage" of Siri records to contractors and suspended user review early August. Apple also announced that users would have the option to choose whether they want their voice recordings to be "rated" by human reviewers in an upcoming software update. In the meantime, turning off Siri is a fairly easy precaution if you want to exercise full control over your voice commands.

AMAZON

Amazon's Alexa, supplied as a software component of the Echo Smart Speaker, competes with Siri for the title of best-known voice assistant. Families often use it to orchestrate their entire families via its many connections to smart devices. Thus, when it appeared that teams of Amazonian workers in Costa Rica, India, Romania and Boston had listened to Alexa records, consumers were naturally fearful. With Amazon, subcontractor access was particularly strong: workers told Bloomberg that they often saw user locations along with voice recordings, and some commentators told Bloomberg that they would share the recordings. that they found funny on chat rooms. Good news: Alexa users can disable the human auditing of the voice assistant in Alexa's privacy settings.

GOOGLE

Google provides the Google Assistant as part of its flagship Google app for iOS, as a software add-on to its smart speaker, Google Home, and to the integration of the Android experience. Like the other voice assistants listed here, reviewers note the response of artificial intelligence to the user's controls, which according to Alphabet, Google's parent company, was "necessary to the creation of products such as Google Assistant. The company defended itself by saying that it only sent 0.2%. Google Home orders to human reviewers, but that would interrupt this process indefinitely. As an extra precaution, Google Assistant users can disable Google settings for keeping voice and audio activity in activity control settings. Google warns that "may limit or disable more personalized experiences on Google services."

FACEBOOK

Rumors so far baseless tarnish Facebook, who is afraid to listen to users without their permission via the microphone of their phone, so that Congress questioned the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at an audition in April. People often complain on social media that ads on the social network are strangely accurate, almost invasive.

The company maintains that it does not listen to users for ad targeting, but its reviewers have heard voice recordings made with Facebook Messenger's voice-over-text transcription feature, which users may have chosen without understanding it. all the implications. Third-party contractors told Bloomberg that they had told their superiors of their concerns about the ethics of their work because management had never informed staff of the reason for the registrations had been made. Facebook said that he had suspended the human examination of voice recordings. As a precaution, check the individual threads in Messenger to make sure that the "Text Auto Voice" option is turned off.

MICROSOFT

Microsoft's voice assistant, Cortana, is not as ubiquitous as Alexa, but the company had other ways to listen to users: Skype and Xbox. All three software services used human contractors to review user registrations. Skype has done it via its translation feature, and the Xbox via its trigger word "Xbox", according to Motherboard, and also via Cortana. According to the subcontractors, many Xbox registrations were for children, which raises confidentiality issues for those under 13, who are more strictly protected by law. Rather than suspend any human involvement, however, Microsoft has updated its privacy policy to indicate that its review process may include people listening to user records.

And what about Samsung's Bixby, preloaded on the tech giant's Galaxy phone lineup? The South Korean company refused to respond to the Daily Beast's requests for comment on human listeners for nearly three weeks.

These are not the first stories revealing the proverbial technology behind the man. Many content moderation algorithms on social networks rely on the human being to make the decision to report to artificial intelligence what should be described as inappropriate. The formation of any algorithm requires huge data sets, which often forces armies of people to tag the data. Large technology firms often rely on third-party contractors, a trend that users have increasingly heard about in recent years.

As is often the case with respect to privacy, making preventative choices in the privacy settings of your most used applications is, to the extent possible, the best way to isolate your own private conversations from privacy. Indiscreet ears do not appeal to AI while technology companies are developing their sniffing practices.

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