Amazon Can Hear What You Tell Alexa And They Even Discuss It

Behind Alexa’s voice assistant that comes built in every Amazon Echo smart speaker is a large number of full-time employees and contractors. Their work is to transcribe what users say to Alexa. What Amazon is up to when they keep these people on the payroll is to help the software understands terms like "Taylor Swift."

Alexa is in Amazon's every smart speaker

The company’s spokesperson said that they kept track on these conversations to improve users’ experience with Alexa. One of the benefits is that they can use what they learned to train the software to better understand speech so that it can give users exactly what they ask for.

He also confirmed that the identity of the people behind these conversations was kept secret. Not everyone can have access to this confidential information as Amazon used multi-factor authentication to prevent this. Plus, there were audits and service encryption to enhance security.

The employees working on this process are believed to have a chat room so that they can get help on sentences or phrases they cannot make out or sometimes, to share funny conversations, Bloomberg revealed.

A more interesting piece of news that Bloomberg found out was when Alexa was activated on purpose or by accident, each of the employees may hear as many as 100 clips recorded in that circumstance without users knowing it. On average, each member of the team reviews up to 1000 clips in one shift, which lasts for 9 hours.

Sometimes, what the employees hear can be very serious. Some of them even believed that they once listened to what they thought was a sexual assault recording. However, Amazon’s policy strictly forbids them to do anything to intervene in cases like that. This information was shared by two Amazon employees.

The company has not yet responded or made any comment on this finding reported by Bloomberg.