Amazon says it sometimes uses your spoken requests to help it improve the accuracy of its Alexa digital assistant, but did you know that teams of humans around the world are reportedly doing some of the listening? A report on Wednesday claimed thousands of people are employed by Amazon to carry out such work.
Thought no one was listening to your Alexa chats? Think again. Amazon reportedly has thousands of workers around the world listening to people’s private exchanges with its digital assistant, as part of a process to improve its performance.
The company employs contractors “from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania” to listen to recordings made with Alexa using Amazon’s Echo speakers, according to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday. They then transcribe and annotate the text before using software to analyze it with the aim of enhancing Alexa’s abilities.
The news outlet spoke to seven individuals who worked on the program, each of whom has signed a nondisclosure agreement that prevents them from speaking publicly about the process.
While Amazon says on its website that it uses “your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” it seems likely that most people would imagine that only computers perform the task, rather than humans.
