Apple also Temporarily stops listening to Siri Fragments. Apple will stop listening to Siri recordings worldwide and is working on a switch-off method.
Apple announced the move a few hours after Google announced on Thursday,
that it would also temporarily stop listening to recordings from its smart assistant.
Recently it turned out that Apple, like Google and Amazon,
had employees listen in on some fragments of assignments to Siri to improve speech recognition.
Apple did not tell customers that people could listen in on their orders.
There was also no option with which customers could switch off data sharing.
Apple will now give that explanation to Siri users and will add a button in an update to stop data sharing.
Dutch fragments too
“We aim to provide a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy,” Apple said in a statement.
“While we are conducting a thorough review, we are postponing Siri review globally.
Also, as part of a future software update, users will have the option of stopping their participation in the review.”
Apple also listens to Dutch fragments.
A team of twenty employees would listen to hundreds of fragments of Siri users every day, and write down what they say.
Usually, it would be fragments of a few seconds, with users unintentionally activating Siri.
“Small percentage”
In the meantime, it is clear that Google, Amazon and Apple sometimes have people check the assignments to their speech assistants.
At all those companies, that means less than 1 or 0.5 percent of the assignments given to such an assistant, say, spokespersons.
With millions of users, that will still amount to thousands of fragments per day.
Among other things, employees listen to assignments that have been mismanaged or have not been adequately understood.
By typing them in, they ensure that those voice commands are understood properly in the future.
In this way, speech assistants become better at understanding dialects and different forms of sentence structure.