Apple is the worldwide practice of having fragments of recordings of its language assistant Siri subsequently evaluated by humans. In a later software update, the users are explicitly asked for permission to do so, said the iPhone company the IT blog TechCrunch in the night on today. Until then, the process will be stopped and put to the test.
For assistance software such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, fragments of recordings have also been heard and tapped by people for years to improve the quality of speech recognition.
For example, cases where language assistants failed, false recognition of activation words, and new languages and dialects. The providers emphasize that the recordings are anonymized. However, the users were largely unaware of the practice until a few months ago first media reports appeared.
Google also stopped listening to recordings
Apple has long been pointing out in a security document that even „a small number of transcriptions“ could be used to improve the service. However, users are not explicitly advised of this option when setting up Siri. In a report of the newspaper „Guardian“ last week told the employee of an Apple service provider, on the recordings are sometimes very private details to hear.
Only yesterday it had become known that Google had already suspended listening to the cuts by people in the EU in early July after a similar report on his assistant.
