Alexa listens

Therefore Alexa not only has artificial but also human ears.

A Bloomberg investigation confirms the army of analysts who correct, label and interpret samples of voice recordings to improve the functioning of the digital assistant. With all the risks involved.

Speech recognition software to interpret and execute requests and commands given by users is not - and could not be - the only listener on the other side of the system. Sometimes, in the audience - so to speak - there may also be analysts in flesh distributed in a series of centers between Boston, Romania, India and Costa Rica. This is explained by a Bloomberg survey based on the revelations of seven several sources according to which certain samples of the audio commands sent to Amazon gadgets so that the assistant Alexa responds and executes (‘Alexa, what will it be like today?’, ‘Alexa, turn on the lights in the living room’ and so on) are passed on to beings humans to be transcribed, annotated and returned to the system. To improve performance, which must become more and more precise.

An issue before everyone’s eyes…

On the other hand, the issue was before everyone’s eyes, and even inserted - even without explicit words - in the cryptic terms of service or, between the lines, in the most frequent questions about the system where we read that the more data we use to train these systems, the better Alexa will work. The point is that at the moment one of the most effective ways to support Seattle’s artificial intelligence (and others) in improving is to submit the most controversial and the least clear requests to human listeners, to dissolve them and make the platform of the home butler smarter. But also other pieces, randomly caught. The procedure, known as ‘data annotation’, is actually quite common.