You Decide…Are They Or Are they Not Listening?
According to a new Bloomberg report
“Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.”
You might ask if there is a reason they do this?“They’re trying to make it better,” CBS News contributor and Wired editor-in-chief Nick Thompson said Friday on “CBS This Morning.” “When you say you want wrapping paper added to your list and it hears raccoon paper, or whatever it hears, it likes to go back to human and see why it made a mistake or why it gave you the wrong answer. It is trying to improve the service.”
“Lots of artificial intelligence systems do this,” he said. “They have machines give you answers. They have the humans check it. They feed the human’s checking back in the machine. The machine gets better.”
What does Amazon say about this?
“We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order to improve the customer experience. … We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”
Wired Editor Nick Thompson says
“If you choose to have one of these devices in your house, you are putting a recording device in your house,” he said, adding, “It will give you great benefits: timers, weather, answering questions. But regardless of whether a human is listening to it, we all know that machines are looking at it. We all know that the data is being fed back into the huge system of Amazon. You need to be aware of what the trade-offs are.”
Theres a way to delete your data through the App.- Go to your Alexa Account
- then to Alexa Privacy and delete your data or opt out of having voice recordings and messages used to develop the plmatform
