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Alexa might not be the only one listening when you ask her to play your favorite song.
According to a reportBloombergpublished this week,Amazon uses an army of workers to listen to audio clips of customers who use Alexa, its artificial intelligence-powered digital assistant found in the popular line of Echo smart speakers and other devices.
The report details how Amazon workers in the U.S., Costa Rica and Romania listen to about a thousand voice recordings during nine-hour shifts, and transcribe and annotate these audio clips before placing the information back into Alexa’s software.
This, the company tells PEOPLE, is part of an effort to improve Alexa’s intelligence and ability to recognize human speech.
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order to improve the customer experience,” Amazon says in a statement. “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.”
Many of the audio clips Amazon’s employees have come across could be considered “mundane,” Bloomberg reported, but sometimes the recordings possibly captured something “upsetting” or “criminal.”
Two workers reportedly said they have even listened to a possible sexual assault. According to the Bloomberg report, “Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.”
Amazon Echo Speaker.Amazon
“Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow,” the company continued in their statement. “While all information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it, customers can delete their voice recordings associated with their account at any time.”
This isn’t the first time Amazon’s devices have made headlines for how they handle privacy. In March 2018, an Oregon couple said an Echo deviceemailed the audio from their private conversationto a random contact 170 miles away.
source: people.com
