Turns out real people sometimes hear what you say to smart speakers

The revelation that Amazon employs people to listen to voice recordings captured from its Echo devices has apparently surprised some people.

The scoop comes courtesy of Bloomberg and seems to have caught the public imagination, as it has been featured prominently by mainstream publications such as the Guardian and BBC News. Apparently Amazon employs thousands of people globally to help improve the voice recognition and general helpfulness of its smart speakers. That means they have to listen to real exchanges sometimes.

That’s it. Nothing more to see here folks. One extra bit of spice was added by the detail that sometimes workers use internal chatrooms to share funny audio files such as people singing in the shower. On a more serious note some of them reckon they’ve heard crimes being committed but were told it’s not their job to interfere.

Amazon sent Bloomberg a fairly generic response amounting to a justification of the necessity of human involvement in the AI and voice recognition process but stressing that nothing’s more important to it than privacy.

Bloomberg’s main issue seems to be that Amazon doesn’t make it explicit enough that another person may be able to listen into your private stuff through an Echo device. Surely anyone who knowingly installs and turns on a devices that is explicitly designed to listen to your voice at all times must be at least dimly aware that there may be someone else on the other end of the line, but even if they’re not it’s not obvious how explicit Amazon needs to be.

An underlying fact of life in the artificial intelligence era is that the development of AI relies on the input of as much ‘real life’ stuff as possible/ Only be experiencing loads of real interactions and scenarios can a machine learn to mimic them and participate in them. In case there is any remaining doubt, if you introduce a device into your house that is designed to listen at all times, that’s exactly what it will do.