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If you thought that it was just an AI listening to your random questions and song requests, think again. We regret to inform you that Amazon actually hires people to listen to the things we say to Alexa. Kind of creepy, huh?
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the company “employs thousands of people to listen to your Alexa conversations.”
In other words, it’s not just little ol’ Alexa that hears what you say. Amazon employees could be listening in as well.
Tens of millions of folks use smart speakers to entertain themselves, accomplish tasks, and more. Still, there are also countless people who are reluctant to do so, often citing security concerns. That fear that someone might be listening, however, isn’t quite so irrational.
It seems someone very well may be listening to your Alexa requests.
Amazon hires thousands of people in several countries around the world just to listen to voice recordings. These are all captured from people using Alexa-enabled devices like the company’s Echo speakers.
Granted, they aren’t specifically trying to spy on folks (or so they say they’re not). These workers simply transcribe the recordings, annotate them, and then feed them back to the software. This, in turn, helps improve how well Alexa interprets human speech. (In short, the machine learning involved here isn’t all done solely by the machines.)
The listening teams consist of both full-time employees and contractors that listen to up to 1,000 clips per nine-hour shift.
The audio that these workers must listen to has been described as everything from “mundane” to sometimes “possibly criminal.” When Alexa is accidentally triggered, the Echo can pick up more private things that users likely don’t want to be heard.
The employees sometimes share files if they find something amusing or need help understanding a muddled utterance. There have also been cases where workers heard things they found distressing or disturbing. A couple of workers even heard what sounded like a sexual assault.
“After requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere,” wrote reporters for Bloomberg.
Of course, as Bloomberg also reported, Amazon claims to take users’ privacy quite seriously.
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” explained an Amazon spokesperson. “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.”
The company spokesperson also added that employees have no way of identifying the users behind the recordings.
The thing is, Amazon doesn’t explicitly disclose this practice of having other human beings listen to our voice recordings.
“We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” is all they say.
There is a privacy setting in Alexa where users can opt out of having their recordings used for the purpose of developing new features. However, even those who opt out of this program may still have their recordings heard by hired analysts.
According to a screenshot obtained by Bloomberg, while the auditors don’t get a full name, they do get some information. The recordings are “associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number.”
Echo devices are only supposed to record when triggered by a wake word – such as “Alexa.” However, most of us have encountered faulty triggers before.
Of course, when it comes to privacy concerns, most people brush them off for convenience. Others simply don’t use smart speakers. However, whether Amazon uses the manually transcribed and annotated information for purposes other than improving Alexa is the real question.
