Facebook Pays Just Rs. 360 For Users Who Give Away Their Voice Recordings

Facebook said on Thursday that the company will level up its speech recognition technology by creating a pool of rewards for some users and their voice recordings. The social network seemingly decides to make such a move after being caught hearing and making use of users’ voice data without their consent. Note that not only Facebook but also other tech giants like Google, Amazon, or even Apple misuse what they’ve collected from users.

In particular, the company runs a brand-new program named “Pronunciations” in its own Viewpoints app, which is tipped to act as a useful tool for Facebook’s market research. If one is qualified enough to participate in the program, he will have to make a recording of his saying “Hey Portal…” followed by the first name of his Facebook friend, and he has to repeat the statement one more time. According to the company, the limit number of friends is ten.

If you’re thinking about being a part of this program to earn money, here’s bad news: Facebook won’t pay you that much. Rather than directly giving cash, it requires users to get enough points in the app to convert them into $5 via PayPal. Each set of recordings is priced at 200 points and you won’t be able to translate these points to cash until you get 1,000 points, at least.

Regarding the privacy concerns, Facebook says it won’t link anything to users’ Facebook accounts and other services without permission, neither voice recordings nor their activities on the Viewpoints app.

Initially, the so-called Pronunciations program is limited to US users who are already 18-year-old and having at least 75 users in his/her friend list. However, there’s been no word on when Facebook will launch it in other countries yet.