Google Admits Its Assistant Records Private Discussions Without User’s Knowledge

Not Just Amazon’s Alexa!

Google has officially joined the list of organizations that uses customer’s voice recordings to enhance its smartphone products while wrapping up all private discussion in the process.

With a leak from one of the company’s employees, Google disclosed it has given workers accessibility to some audio recordings of its Google Home and Android smart speakers.

Google also acknowledged it made available snippets to language experts in order to manually review the recordings and to study customer’s speech.

Contractors for Google have been analyzing audio from its Google Home device

‘We partner with language experts around the world to improve speech technology by transcribing a small set of queries – this work is critical to developing technology that powers products like the Google Assistant.” Google explained in a statement.

While Google only reviews relatively few numbers of audio snippets from users, 0.2% of the recorded conversation are largely reviewed by Google contractors.

Some of those recordings are, however, gotten without user uttering a commanding tone such as ‘OK Google’ or ‘Hey Google.’

Google will join the ranks of companies who use the Echo device to record customers’ audio

Reportedly, out of the 1,000 excerpts leaked by an employee, about one hundred and fifty-three were extracted without such commands. Accordingly, the excerpt includes a discussion between parents and their children, arguments, and official phone call that entails concealed information.

An important excerpt witnessed a woman who was in definite distress as well as queries that involve men using their smart hub to search for pornography scene.

Revealing that an investigation had however been launched after realizing some Dutch audio data has been leaked out, Google said it’s currently conducting a review on the leaker and promised it will ensure that no audio is leaked in the future.