Amazon Echo: Thousands of employees listen to what you say to Alexa

To improve the Echo speakers, thousands of Amazon employees listen to everything you ask Alexa. All your requests are indeed analyzed by real humans. Sometimes they hear people singing in the shower. In other cases, they are the indirect witnesses of a sexual assault. Explanations.

Thousands of employees listen to what you say to Amazon Echo Alexa

Amazon employs thousands of people around the world to improve the performance of Alexa, the smart assistant on Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Spot or Echo Show speakers. According to our colleagues from Bloomberg, all voice requests recorded by Alexa are retranscribed and added to a huge database for analysis.

Thousands of Amazon employees spy on your conversations with Alexa

According to 7 Amazon employees who participated in this program, your conversations with Alexa are listened to by providers from many countries, such as the United States, Costa Rica, India or Romania. On average, each employee works 9 hours a day and analyzes up to 1,000 audio clips.

In most cases, it is a laborious and repetitive job. One of the interviewees claims to have annotated hundreds of audio clips claiming Taylor Swift's music. Sometimes employees come across more funny situations, such as "a woman who sings badly in the shower". The most fun audio clips are shared in internal chat rooms, reports the former analyst.

Unfortunately, they sometimes discover records related to a criminal act. Two employees based in Romania claim to have witnessed a sexual assault, recorded by the microphone of an Amazon Echo speaker. According to them, the firm of Jeff Bezos considers that it is not his role to intervene in this kind of business. Amazon asserts, however, that "procedures have been put in place" for situations of this kind.

Amazon admits to listening to what you say to Alexa ... but it's for your good

"We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously," says an Amazon spokesperson. "We are only annotating a very small sample of Alexa voice recordings to improve your customer experience. This information helps us to train our speech recognition and language comprehension systems, which allows Alexa to better understand your requests, "says the group.

Amazon recalls that "employees do not have direct access to information that identifies the person or account". Your records are anonymous and can not be traced back to you. Same story on the side of Apple and Google. In both giants, teams are indeed responsible for analyzing the voice requests received by Siri and Google Assistant. As with Amazon, these audio extracts are 100% anonymous. What do you think of these revelations? Are you going to look at your Echo speaker with another eye?