hello Automators thanks for tuning in again so here I am sitting with my
Amazon devices and I was going through the latest updates and news stories and
I ran into a couple of stories over the last couple of weeks and actually one
that's breaking today that is about Amazon listening to your conversations
with your Alexa voice assistant here and they're actually paying people either
staff or contractors that actually hasn't been stated but they're paying
people to go and listen to those recordings and then feeding what you
basically said back into voice recognition program so that they can
continue to improve their Alexa voice assistant so I want to give you my
thoughts about this both from a privacy perspective and also have a little bit
of a concern from a software perspective here if this is the practice Amazon is
taking so let's start with the privacy concern and I think that is actually
going to be the biggest part and some people are gonna be really upset about
this but Amazon has confirmed that they do have people that they hire to listen
to a random set of your conversations with the voice assistant and they called
these everything from mundane conversations to up to criminal intent
type of level things where they said something about sexual assault and I
mean wow okay we are hiring people to listen to things like that now if that's
going on I hope that there's a method for Amazon to actually go and report
those people quite frankly the privacy concern that goes along with this is can
those people now that are listening to your conversations go and identify you
and what has been stated is that those people will have access to your Amazon
account number not your personal information and what Amazon is stating
is that they are very serious about keeping that information your personally
identifiable information out of the hand those people doing it and they take it
operationally very serious as well the other thing that these people would have
access to is your serial number now when I hear this kind of a scenario number
one what it sounds like to me is Amazon is actually hiring contracted out
companies that wouldn't have access to another database that would give them
that personally identifiable information so what I'm hearing is they're
contracting this out these companies are listening to your conversations it's
attached to an Amazon Voice number and then they're feeding it back in to the
system to help Amazon's Alexa voice assistant get better at
understanding what it is you exactly set during that interaction so if that's the
truth then those people basically have no other way of getting your Amazon
account information and then getting all of that information that's already
contained in Amazon's larger what I'm sure is a massive database of customer
information now if they're an internal employee I struggle with the thought of
them being unable to kind of connect the dots because it it's gotta be just a few
databases doesn't it there's an easy way to avoid this because it's actually just
based on a couple of settings inside of Amazon's voice assistant application
once you go into that application go up to the menu top left and go down to
settings from there you're going to hit the account section which is up at the
very top and then you will go to the privacy settings now inside of here
you're going to see four different sections at least today that's what
you're going to see the first setting you're going to want to work with is
manage how data improves their voice assistant and once you go into that
setting you can see that there's two buttons here right now help develop new
features and do you want to use messages to improve transcriptions and that's the
one right there that is what they're using today now I'll tell you that top
one sounds like exactly the same thing they're going to be using your voice
recordings to develop new features so if you want to turn this
entirely you're going to need to turn off both but they're telling you when
you do that with the top one that you will not be necessarily getting all of
the newest features so there is a plus and a minus here too actually doing this
once you do that you can also delete all of your voice recording so that's in the
Revue voice history setting and once you go inside of that you can actually
remove or delete all of your voice recordings just by changing the setting
to all-time and then tapping the button that says delete all recordings the
other side of this is what this actually says for amazon's
software and that's actually what the thing personally me I'm the most
concerned about because yeah okay find someone's listening to me randomly tell
this thing to turn on lights fine or it's it's heard me ask for a search
about my dog I don't know I don't care if somebody's heard that and can
identify who I am if they could identify who I was before with the same database
then what do I care I've already given that information now they've just heard
my voice but the secure the the software side of thing this is what concerns me
why would Amazon have to take your your what you said recognize that it was
wrong and then put it into their speech recognition thing and or software and
then have that be the input that learns like if if this is such a manual thing
then they really don't have a good baseline to this software I have real
concerns because I will guarantee you that we will never hear Google or Apple
say that that's what they're doing there is no way they are having their software
learn on its own it's learning from I got it right or I got it wrong and
here's how I have to learn the next component or they have other methods
that they're teaching these devices to understand people but my expectation of
a software company is that they shouldn't have to be feeding a
in manually input information into it what is supposed to be an AI so that's
the thing that gets me the most about reading this and I wanted to share that
with you so that you understood a bit of what I consider to be another
differentiate er between Google assistant and Amazon's voice assistant
and I think this explains in a lot of ways why Amazon continues to fall behind
both Google and Apple in terms of the responses with their voice assistants
this is explaining a lot to me when I read stories like this so what do you
guys think I know you know I'm drawing some conclusions here but as a computer
engineer who's built software and who's who's seen complex software not like
this not at this level but these kinds of things have me concerned when I read
about that and where we're using what is supposed to be an AI
you