Voice In Canada Flash Briefing #431

Alright. Hello. It’s Teri here and today it’s a followup flash briefing to the flash briefing yesterday. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to that one, you can go to VoiceinCanada.ca and you can listen to that, but basically, yesterday I talked about the fact that there was an article released that says Amazon employees are listening to some of our recordings in order to help Alexa learn better.

Now, there are granted, some privacy concerns with this, but I want to highlight a couple of key features here, a couple of key facts, and why I think this is not as big of a deal as some people are making it out to be.

The first one is that we have control over when Alexa listens to us because we have to activate her. We have to say the wake word, “Alexa”, or whatever yours is set for.

If you do not say that, then there’s nothing being recorded. That’s the first thing. Second thing is that you have the option of disabling the recordings of being sent to Amazon if you want to.

In your settings, in the privacy settings, you can delete them, and you can deactivate the feature that allows Alexa to send these recordings to Amazon.

Now, if you do that, there’s less chance that Alexa going to be as responsive to you because she’s not going to be able to learn your voice and your nuances and when you speak.

The third part is that the Amazon employees that are analyzing the aggregated transcriptions of what you’re saying for patterns to then feed back to Alexa so she can learn, these are not identifiable to you.

So these employees do get some of the recordings and the transcriptions of what you’ve said, but they are not identifiable to you so they don’t know who they’re coming from.

Amazon employees are listening to some of our recordings in order to help Alexa learn better.

Is Amazon Listening to You Part 2

So they are strictly looking for patterns. The example I gave yesterday was Taylor Swift. It’s a lot of people are saying Taylor swift and they can annotate these transcriptions and say that it’s in reference to a musical artist, that actually makes Alexa smarter.

So they are not going after you or your personal information. They are not able to identify you. And what’s key, is that along the whole way, if you want to limit this option, you don’t want to share these recordings with Amazon, you can turn that off.

So, I think Alexa has to learn. That’s the only way the technology is going to get better. And in fact, that’s no different than any other company, or any other technology that is learning from what you’re saying, using natural language, understanding.

It has to learn. They have to take those audio signals, they have to take the annotated recordings, and they have to be able to look for patterns and improve the technology. So, I’m all for Alexa getting better.

And for that reason, quite frankly, I don’t care about this. They can have my recordings of me saying, you know, turn off my lights, and you know, listen to Taylor Swift. Alright? I’d love to hear your comments on this. Hit me up @DrTeriFisher on Twitter. Alright. Talk to you soon.

Useful Resources

Listen on your Echo Device! Easy as 1-2-3!

Voice in Canada Skill Logo1. Open your Alexa app and click on the Menu button > Settings > Flash Briefing.
2. Click on “Add Content” and search for “Voice in Canada”.
3. Click on “Voice in Canada” and the Enable button.

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