We don’t have confirmation about this piece of news (or rumor) but a Reddit user recently posted that he now works for a company that listens to voice recordings and commands sent to Siri and Cortana. A company known as Walk N’ Talk Technologies is said to be in the business of checking voice to text translations and interpretations. FallenMyst, the Reddit user, said that he just started in his new job that requires him to listen to audio recordings of commands.
The voice commands sent are not in real time because according to FallenMyst, his job is to check if the audio file and the text based translation correspond to each other.He listens to a file, compares it with the text, and check if they are correct. If not, he makes a note in his evaluation. According to FallenMyst, he has heard some unusual recordings like sexting and weird commands which is not really surprising.
Only mentioned were Siri and Cortana. Google Now, which is now ahead of Siri, was not included. I’m guessing Google has it’s own team or has outsourced an agency to check the translations. That seems a relief for us Android users, at least, for now and until we learn a similar case of our Google Now searches being evaluated.
To be fair, Microsoft and Apple have mentioned something about this on their terms. You know how most people don’t really care to read the terms and fine print. Who reads them anyway? But in this case, the two tech giants have warned the users. Not that anyone is complaining but just in case somebody raises a complaint about the issue of their privacy being invaded or whatever.
FallenMyst said data are anonymized so evaluators will never know who sent the voice recording. That is good news. Honestly, I don’t really see any big problem here because the goal of Microsoft and Apple, through the work of Walk N’ Talk Technologies, is to improve voice to text engines and translations.
As for Google, we won’t be surprised if a similar case comes up because the search engine has this habit of archiving as much data as possible: Gmail messages, search queries, chat conversations, and more.
The biggest problem that I see here is on the part of the Reddit user. FallenMyst just started a new job and he’s already talking about what he does online when clearly, he shouldn’t. If I’m his boss and I find out about this, it would be so easy to identify the employee. It would also be easy to fire him due to a breach of contract or not following the confidentiality clause.
SOURCE: Forbes
IMAGE: Bhupinder Nayyar on Flickr
