Voice assistants have only been in our lives for a few years. Although we are familiar with it from our phones in general, they are everywhere in almost every corner of the world, from smart home appliances to cars. And each has its own ‘magic word’.
‘Hey Siri’ ‘Ok Google’ or Alexa… These calls wake your sleeping assistant and make them listen to you. Okay, but if these voice assistants don’t listen to us all the time -which they are said to be – how come they hear when we call? That’s our question, now let’s move on to the answer.
As a matter of fact, your assistants listen to you 24/7… But there is no need to panic.
What we have to distinguish here is the difference between listening and recording and processing, sending it to the database. All voice assistants are constantly listening to you to hear the ‘wake word’ known as the ‘wake word’. That’s right here.
But in this listening process, they’re kind of asleep, just waiting for that word to start paying attention and recording.
Sometimes we are in a state between sleep and wakefulness. We hear voices, but our brains have begun to sleep. The sounds we hear do not mean anything to us, we do not attach meaning to them. But at that moment, if our mother calls out to us, ‘What happened?’ we can sober up in panic. We can actually compare the situation of voice assistants until they hear the wake-up words.
After hearing their names, they wake up and begin to serve you by perceiving the command you say, sending it to the database and processing it.
In other words, even though Siri hears the sounds in the environment until you call her, she doesn’t actually listen. In that state, the only sound she’s programmed to detect is the ‘magic word’ you call her, she.
Bigger ‘eavesdropping’ scandals have surfaced in the past regarding voice assistants
After ‘waking’ them to voice assistants working with artificial intelligence, every command is recorded, transferred to the database, processed and applied. In other words, the main ‘rest’ issue happens after you give the command and wake up your assistant.
Some news on this subject in recent years revealed that the data recorded by Alexa and Google Assistant was listened to by Amazon and Google employees. The companies that made a statement after the news confirmed the situation. However, they stated that only a small part of the audio recordings were listened to. For example, Google said it was only 0.02%. Amazon, on the other hand, talked about a rate at this level again.
As a reason for listening, they cited the improvement of artificial intelligence’s efforts to process data and deliver better results. It is true that artificial intelligence develops not on its own, but with information coming from humans, it needs the sentences we use, especially when improving itself in language, and thus it can offer more consistent and realistic results ‘like a human’.
In fact, in our video above about artificial intelligence, we asked Merve Noyan, a software engineer and data scientist working at Google, about this subject and we got answers about the process of how artificial intelligence can talk like a human.
However, for this development process, when people’s voice recordings were listened to by other people working in companies and it caused controversy, Google, Apple and Amazon announced that they suspended the ‘human review’ of user recordings.
So what happened as a result, are our data and audio recordings safe?
As ordinary users, it is normal for us to experience such unease. Not a day goes by that giant companies do not experience data leaks… Due to these data leaks, many people’s data is endangered over and over again. To rest or to record our footprint on the Internet; This means that data may one day be leaked as well.
This being the case, it is not surprising that our minds are blurred when companies make such statements. However, especially in the last few years, states have taken great steps in this regard and critical decisions have been taken in terms of the privacy and protection of personal data. Tech giants are also cornered on many issues, and it’s harder for them to use our data now.
At this point, what we can do as users is to be a conscious internet and technology user. While giving those permissions to the apps we download, stop and think, avoid sharing our data with unreliable sources, and review all the permissions we have control over the devices and applications of giants like Google and Apple…
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