Smart speakers have received a great welcome to the industry as it made everyone’s life more digital and futuristic. More than ten million people are now using smart speakers like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, etc. From the time it came to the market, some controversial things were evolving around us, which mainly included the privacy concerns of the users who are telling things to their smart speakers. However, all these companies ensured ultimate privacy for smart speaker users.
Now things have changed a lot. Your privacy stays as a myth when Amazon employs thousands of people across the world to help them improve the experience of Alexa-powered smart speakers. This team will be listening to the voice recordings saved from the users of Amazon Echo devices. The recordings will be transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software to improve the speaker’s understanding of human words. The company is aiming to eliminate the gap between the smart speakers and human by observing and validating the voice recordings of customers who are using these devices at their home or office.
Amazon always advertises Alexa as it lives in the clouds without a human touch. However, just like any other tools/software, a human role is there. Yes, humans control their activity and teach the assistant to respond better to human commands.
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman said in a statement. “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.