Convinced what you say around your Amazon Echo is heard by more than just you and Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa? It turns out you’re right, as Amazon has now confirmed that it actually does listen to some Alexa voice recordings.
Amazon employs a team of people specifically to listen to some of the voice clips which are recorded by the Echo and other Amazon smart speakers once it hears its ‘wake’ word - the word you say to make the voice assistant spring into action.
Why are they listening?
The team listens and transcribes these recordings and then feeds them back to Alexa so she can respond better to commands.
'We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order to improve the customer experience,' Amazon said.
'For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.'
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Can I stop this?
It is possible to opt out of Amazon’s program that uses voice recording to develop new features. To do this, open the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet, and press the Menu icon in the top left-hand corner (it looks like three short horizontal lines on top of each other). Now press Settings and Select Alexa account. From the options displayed choose Alexa privacy, now tap Manage how your data improves Alexa and turn off the slider next to Help Develop new features.
However, according to Bloomberg, which uncovered the fact voice recordings being analysed, there’s a chance that even if you opt out of helping with new feature development program, your recording may still be analysed.
Amazon also told Bloomberg that the reviewers aren’t given the full name and address of the users voice clips they’re transcribing. Instead, they can see an account number that is associated with the user, their first name and the device’s serial number.
