A Reddit user called FallenMyst has just started a new job at a company called Walk N' Talk Technologies. His position requires that he listen - according to his post - to commands given to Cortana and Siri. The purpose is to check for incorrect interpretations by the voice to text translators.
He describes some of the things he's heard, like sexting via voice and people giving the usual banal and weird commands to their phones. He also describes the process he goes through, and what his job is:
I'm given an audio file (sound bite) and the corresponding text based translation (how the phone translated the speech). My job is to listen to the file, compare it to the text and provide feedback on how correctly the sound bite was interpreted by the phone. If the text and speech are a perfect match, I just move on. However, if the phone either translated something incorrectly due to a heavy accent or loud background noise, I note that in my evaluation.
So, how do I feel about this? The first question I asked myself was whether I suspected this was the case anyway. My answer to that was actually "no". Of course, I'm absolutely certain that if I studied the terms for both Cortana and Siri then I would discover that both Microsoft and Apple are entitled to do such things.
But, as South Park illustrated some time ago, pretty much no one actually reads those over-long legal documents. For that of course, we the users must accept our fair share of the liability. We were, after all, warned.
And the data is clearly anonymized, FallenMyst might know you asked Siri that question about that rash, but he doesn't know who asked the question. And there's not really anything underhand going on here. The goal is to improve the voice to text engines, and make them more reliable in future. Even so, it's still a little bit weird to think of your voice and questions being heard by a human.
In the same way we know that Google can see what we search for, and what we write in Gmail messages, we also sort of assume that it's a bit too busy to actually spend any time worrying about us as individuals.
And on the subject of Google, here's something else interesting that came out of the discussion on Reddit - Google keeps, and you can hear, a back catalogue of all your Google Now searches. Mine doesn't list very many, but on the Google account page, you can listen to your own voice making search queries. It's kind of weird in truth. It's also important to point out that Google isn't mentioned as part of this Reddit thread. No doubt Google is doing error checking on its searches, it does that in-house.
Perhaps the issue here is not so much that someone can hear the things we say to our phones, but perhaps that someone is on Reddit talking about it. I'm pretty sure FallenMyst will have a confidentiality clause in their contact - seriously, who doesn't have one in their contract? And if they get found out, then this might be the end of their employment.
So, here's my question to you Forbes readers: did you know this was happening, and does it bother you?
