Amazon have responded to these reports in a recent statement.
Amazon staff listen to recordings of customer interactions with voice-based assistant Alexa to help train the artificial intelligence’s responses, according to recent reports in Bloomberg.
It has been revealed that the tech giants listen to conversations in an attempt to further their understanding of “muddled words”, and that amusing recordings were shared among staff members.
Some of the recordings they have listened to have been described as “distressing”, but Amazon have said it had procedures in place for workers to follow when they heard these types of clip.
A spokesperson for Amazon has since responded to the reports, confirming that staff members do listen to recordings.
She 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 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.
“Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.
“All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it.”
The product was first released to Irish audiences in 2016, and saw immediate popularity.
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