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Neither of those articles mention that real people listen to the recordings: The updated version of the milleniumreport lists: > Update: But what about the bi

Neither of those articles mention that real people listen to the recordings: The updated version of the milleniumreport lists: > Update: But what about the bigger pool of data, the aggregated voice queries from each system’s user base? According to this Bloomberg story, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are using all that variety to hone these systems’ understanding of spoken language even further. Several times a day, Amazon uses the entire stack of Alexa queries to educate its A.I. about dialects and casual speech. Microsoft has mysterious fake apartments(!) set up to record and understand natural speech patterns. Google slices and dices the audio it’s already captured, then remixes it to help train its system. All these methods are meant to make your voice assistant smarter in the coming years. Nothing in that paragraph would suggest to a normal user that actual human beings listen to their recordings. In fact, it would suggest the opposite: that in order to get around human review, Microsoft would go to the trouble of setting up fake apartment buildings to do tests in. Amazon educates its AI about queries using the entire stack of queries? Well certainly, that's not happening with a human being, it would be too labor intensive. This is in an article designed for non-technical users, that has to explain much more legitimately obvious things like wake words: > Listening to what you say before a wake word is essential to the entire concept of wake words. The process borrows a page from the pre-buffer on many cameras’ burst modes, which capture a few frames before you press the shutter button. This just does it with your voice. Yet when it gets to the "low-paid contractors will occasionally listen to you having sex" part, suddenly everything is very vague. Ordinary people did not understand this, and based on Gruber's article, a good number of technical people did not understand either. And in light of the quote at the end of this article, why should Gruber need to read Wired to figure out what's happening on his devices? That's not a good user experience. Yes, maybe you can argue that he should have understood what "for testing and product improvement purposes" entailed. But he didn't. A lot of people don't know how AI works, and they don't know how ML testing works, and they shouldn't have to.

Terretta 7y ago
> Neither of those articles mention that real people listen to the recordings Recall that Siri was an acquisition. If you go back to media then, you’ll see many companies were doing this at the time. There was lots of coverage about humans training. Some companies even got in trouble that it was only* humans, even the supposedly AI parts. (An email transcription service, for example, had a human transcription center in Egypt.) Point being, this was known, and seems to have been forgotten. Even now, all of them mean people reviewing quality when they say for product improvement purposes. Anyone who has called any big company knows exactly what the phrase “for quality improvement purposes” means. They tell you they’re going to be recording your call for quality improvement purposes and while they don’t say this part, you absolutely know it means there’s a chance someone is going to listen to it. Since that’s about the only time people ever hear the phrase not buried in legalese, it could be assumed that’s what it means in other contexts as well. * EDIT: Linking to a history of Siri since it’s been over a decade now: https://www.bestaiassistant.com/siri/old-siri-history-siri-apple/ https://www.bestaiassistant.com/siri/old-siri-history-siri-a...
- danShumway 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you that it's reasonable to link those phrases to a real person listening, or even that people do link those phrases in other contexts. But they haven't linked them where AI is concerned. There could be a couple of reasons for that -- it could be that phone recordings are primarily human analyzed, and because AI has more automatic learning, people just assumed it was different. Or maybe it used to be obvious and then over time people just assumed AI matured enough that it wasn't necessary any more. But regardless, it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of people (even smart people that I respect) didn't understand. So to me, talking about whether they should have understood doesn't change much -- I still think it would behoove a privacy-centric company to be a lot more clear now that we know that people don't understand.

Terretta 7y ago

> Neither of those articles mention that real people listen to the recordings Recall that Siri was an acquisition. If you go back to media then, you’ll see many companies were doing this at the time. There was lots of coverage about humans training. Some companies even got in trouble that it was only* humans, even the supposedly AI parts. (An email transcription service, for example, had a human transcription center in Egypt.) Point being, this was known, and seems to have been forgotten. Even now, all of them mean people reviewing quality when they say for product improvement purposes. Anyone who has called any big company knows exactly what the phrase “for quality improvement purposes” means. They tell you they’re going to be recording your call for quality improvement purposes and while they don’t say this part, you absolutely know it means there’s a chance someone is going to listen to it. Since that’s about the only time people ever hear the phrase not buried in legalese, it could be assumed that’s what it means in other contexts as well. * EDIT: Linking to a history of Siri since it’s been over a decade now: https://www.bestaiassistant.com/siri/old-siri-history-siri-apple/ https://www.bestaiassistant.com/siri/old-siri-history-siri-a...

danShumway 7y ago
I don't disagree with you that it's reasonable to link those phrases to a real person listening, or even that people do link those phrases in other contexts. But they haven't linked them where AI is concerned. There could be a couple of reasons for that -- it could be that phone recordings are primarily human analyzed, and because AI has more automatic learning, people just assumed it was different. Or maybe it used to be obvious and then over time people just assumed AI matured enough that it wasn't necessary any more. But regardless, it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of people (even smart people that I respect) didn't understand. So to me, talking about whether they should have understood doesn't change much -- I still think it would behoove a privacy-centric company to be a lot more clear now that we know that people don't understand.