Your Xbox listens to you, as do Microsoft's subcontractors

The owners of Microsoft Xbox will be amazed to learn that humans have listened to some of their voice commands. Motherboard recently spoke to a number of Microsoft subcontractors who said they had been hired by the company to review Xbox and Cortana voice commands to improve the technology. It's the same thing that's been happening with all kinds of voice assistants lately, but that does not make it any less disturbing.

This latest report follows a previous report from the motherboard on Microsoft hiring subcontractors to listen to Skype recordings. It would appear that a similar team has also been recruited to examine Xbox recordings to train software that optimizes voice control functions. One entrepreneur stated that "most of the voices heard were children", which is scary.

Nevertheless, it is now clear that adding voice control to various devices has generally involved listening to our recordings by humans. The technology that drives voice control and voice assistants simply requires human review in order to be improved. It is also very clear that the companies that build this technology have done a terrible job in communicating this human involvement to users.

Since information was released earlier this year that humans were examining Amazon Alexa records, we learned that similar teams were at work at Apple, Google, and Facebook. These three companies have since suspended their processes of human examination. Meanwhile, Amazon has offered users the option of not participating in the human review process. Following the Motherboard reports, Microsoft has updated its privacy policy to state that "its processing of personal data for these purposes includes automated and manual (human) processing methods."

So, play, Xbox users. But be aware that anything you say to your console could possibly be heard by a human hired by Microsoft. They are not exactly spying. But they listen.