Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
Amazon.com Inc. has a group of people assigned for listening vocal instructions to Alexa that are captured in Echo devices with the purpose of improving Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands. The team, which comprises of contractors and Amazon employees from Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania, emphasizes on the importance of human role in training software algorithms.
Working nine hours a day, each reviewer look into about 1,000 audio clips per shift with clips ranging from being about mundane things like people singing in the shower to pretty upsetting things like criminal activities and sexual violence. The company states it takes the security and privacy of customers’ personal information seriously and whenever employees come across unsettling things like this they can do nothing but share the experience amongst each other to relieve stress. According to Amazon, the employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account and all information is treated with high confidentiality with multi-factor authentication to restrict access.
With Echo’s debut in 2014, use of voice software became quickly popular across homes and before long, the world saw the launch of Google Home and HomePod. Most modern speech-recognition devices like Alexa look for patterns amid large number of data, using probability to make educated guesses. But sometimes they get it wrong, often running into trouble with new slang, regional colloquialisms or languages other than English and that is why Amazon recruited human helpers; to fill in the gaps missed by computer programs.