Yahoo News Amazon workers are listening to your conversations with Alexa
Amazon staff are listening to recordings of people’s conversations with Alexa to help train the virtual assistant’s responses, it has emerged.
Review teams around the world are analysing recordings gathered from Amazon Echo speakers and using the conversations to improve Alexa’s software, Bloomberg reported.
The Alexa app keeps a log of interactions with users and can apparently be listened to or deleted from within the app.
According to Bloomberg’s report, staff reported hearing some distressing conversations but Amazon said it has procedures in place for such occasions.
In a statement, Amazon confirmed it did use some recordings as part of its work to improve Alexa’s ability to understand human language and speech patterns, but has strict security systems in place to keep users’ data safe.
A spokeswoman said: “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order to improve the customer experience.
“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.
“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero-tolerance policy for the abuse of our system.”
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She said employees do not have direct access to information that could identify the person or account and all information is treated confidentially, including the use of multi-factor authentication to restrict access as well as service encryption.
Concerns have been raised in the past that some smart speaker systems could be used to listen to user conversations.
Last year Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg was asked by a US Senate committee if the social network used microphones in mobile devices to listen in on people, something he strongly denied, labelling it a “conspiracy theory”.
