In most cases, this is laborious and repetitive work. One of the interviewees claims to have annotated hundreds of audio quotes claiming Taylor Swift’s music. Sometimes employees encounter funnier situations such as: “a woman who sings badly in the shower”. The funniest sound clips are shared in internal chat roomsreports former analyst.
Unfortunately, they sometimes discover records related to a criminal act. Two Romania-based employees claim to have witnessed sexual assaultrecorded by the microphone of an Amazon Echo speaker. According to them, Jeff Bezos’ firm believes it is not his role to interfere in such affairs. But Amazon claims “Procedures implemented” for such situations.
Amazon admits it’s listening to what you tell Alexa….but it’s for your own good
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously” says an Amazon spokesperson. “We only annotate a very small sample of Alexa voice recordings to improve your customer experience. This information helps us train our speech recognition and language understanding systems, which helps Alexa better understand your requests.” says the group.
Amazon remembers this “employees do not have direct access to personally identifiable or account information”. Therefore, your records are anonymous and cannot be identified as belonging to you. Same story on Apple and Google side. At the two giants, teams are indeed responsible for analyzing the voice requests received by Siri and Google Assistant. As with Amazon, these audio excerpts are 100% anonymous. What do you think of these disclosures? Will you look at your Echo speaker differently?
