Smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo and Apple HomePod are hearing your conversations and probably recording them as well. But what you might not have known is these companies have humans sitting behind the desk and listening to your chats.
This has been reported by Bloomberg on Thursday, which says that Amazon has thousands of people on board, who’re basically there to listen to users’ conversations, transcribe them and feed it back into software, to help Alexa learn human interaction better.
After all, that’s how machine learning adapts itself, where humans feed information into machines, in this case Alexa, the voice assistant. So, the next time you hear Amazon saying ‘all the Alexa recordings are kept on the cloud’ it’s going to be hard to believe them.
The report further elucidates that Amazon has set up its team across different parts of the world, including India, where most of the Echo smart speakers are available to the consumer.
Speaking anonymously to the news site, these people are said to be working over nine hours, where they end up going through over 1,000s of recordings, check them for mistakes and send it back to respond. But their work patterns end up making them listen to conversations which were supposed to be private, and sometimes even upsetting.
Such conversations are shared in the internal chat rooms by the employees, who’re asked to reveal the details to relieve their stress.
In its defence, Amazon says only a small sample of Alexa recordings are annotated, but just the admission is likely to spook users of such devices even more.
Amazon mentions that every time a user activates an Echo device by saying the trigger word ‘Alexa’, the voice assistant records everything you say to it and stores it at the back-end.
The device does not have the permission to record or send any data unless the user says the voice assistant’s trigger word. There must be times when an acoustic aberration might trigger Alexa whereby it starts speaking random gibberish, but that is an anomaly and happens rarely.
Simply saying, two people could be talking about the Tata Hexa or Maruti Nexa and Alexa might get activated out of nowhere. It has happened with many.
More Culprits Out There
But Amazon would say it’s not alone. Another report from BBC cites Apple and Google also have humans at their end who’re listening to conversations of users with their respective smart speakers.
And in case of Google and Apple, not only are speaker conversations being heard, even the Assistant (Siri, Google Assistant) running on phones (including iPhone) are also being reviewed. To make things feel safer, both these companies seem to have fool-proof security measures, to make sure the identity of the said user and his/her conversations are not recognisable.
Siri, according to Apple resets itself as and when the voice assistant is turned off.
While Amazon doesn’t let you opt out of voice recording or human reviews, just like Google and Apple, users get the power to delete the chats via multiple steps which are listed on the company’s support page.
In all, it would be unfair to single out Amazon’s Alexa as a culprit. The fact that it is listening to your conversations and recording data can be considered a necessary evil for the technology to work.
In the end, users have to be responsible and have to be circumspect and vigilant on how they use technology. Because, ‘they’ are listening.
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