Voice In Canada Flash Briefing #430

Hey there. I hope you are doing well. It’s Teri here with your flash briefing today. And today, I want to talk to you about a news article that was recently released from Bloomberg. This centers around the issue, or the question of, is Amazon or are Amazon employees listening to what you’re saying to Alexa.

Now, here’s the thing. This is a two-part flash briefing. I’m going to talk about the issue today and tomorrow I’m going to give you a few of my thoughts on it as well, but today, the article really asks the question; “Is Amazon listening to what you’re saying?”

And the bottom line is, they are to a certain degree. In order for Alexa to get better with the natural language understanding, and the AI, and basically being able to give you better responses. There has to be some sort of learning that goes on in the background.

So, how does that learning work? Well, Amazon has employed as part of this learning process, thousands of people around the world to help improve Alexa. And what happens is, the team listens to some voice recordings that are captured in Echos owners’ homes.

The recordings are transcribed, annotated, and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to help Alexa to learn. And, these employees are all around the world from Boston to Costa Rica, India, Romania, and so on. So what happens is, they are listening for patterns.

There has to be some sort of learning that goes on in the background.

Is Amazon Listening to You: Part 1

They are annotating what you’re saying, and they feed it back into Alexa so that she can learn better. An example that they give is, they aggregate a bunch of recordings where a reference to Taylor Swift is made, and then they put that together, and they annotate them to indicate that the person speaking meant the musical artist, Taylor Swift.

And by doing this with multiple recordings, Amazon can improve Alexa. And, I personally want Alexa to improve. I think that’s a good thing. And the only way that Alexa can improve is to listen to what you’re saying, and then to be able to capture that, and learn from it, and identify patterns.

So, is this an issue with privacy? Well, some people say it is. Personally, I know that when I’m using Alexa, and I have activated Alexa with the voice command saying the word, “Alexa”, I know that she’s recording and that’s going to the cloud.

So, if that’s the information that they’re using, I’m actually not too concerned about that. I want to get into this a little bit more tomorrow, cause I think it’s an important topic, but for the sake of time, we’re going to keep this flash briefing short.

That’s why I said this is a two-parter, and if you tune in tomorrow, I’ll tell you my ideas on it and why I don’t think it’s such an issue when it comes to our personal privacy. If you want to share your thoughts, just hit me up on Twitter @DrTeriFisher and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Useful Resources

Listen on your Echo Device! Easy as 1-2-3!

Voice in Canada Skill Logo1. Open your Alexa app and click on the Menu button > Settings > Flash Briefing.
2. Click on “Add Content” and search for “Voice in Canada”.
3. Click on “Voice in Canada” and the Enable button.

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