Hello, Dina here. It seems that much of the intelligence behind voice-controlled services from Amazon.com Inc., Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. isn't all that artificial -- people are heavily involved.
This week, Bloomberg's Sarah Frier reported Facebook paid hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe audio clips from users of its Messenger chat service. In May, it was Amazon that was revealed to employ thousands of people to help its Alexa digital assistant better understand human speech. Motherboard found similar activity by Microsoft. A Belgian news outlet found this practice at Google, too.
Humans are often used to train AI software, so in some ways this should be expected -- although companies often failed to disclose this clearly, or at all, to users, and also failed to show much regard for the privacy implications of workers listening to other people's personal moments.
Developing AI algorithms that really work requires constant retraining and updating of the formulas and that often involves humans manually correcting mistakes or providing judgments that the software incorporates and uses to improve. This is what Amazon said was happening with Alexa -- voice recordings were captured, transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software.
Speech-recognition services need to recognize proper nouns, words that sound similar or are specific to certain subjects. They need to parse a wide array of accents and inflections, and Alexa has to figure out what to do when kids are shouting two different song requests over each other.
But the sheer volume of people employed by some of these companies to listen to conversations begs a question: How well are these AI services working? This technology should require less human intervention over time. But right now, much of AI is like the artificial food Soylent Green in the 1973 movie of the same name -- it's people! (h/t to Mary Branscombe).
If this situation doesn't improve soon, the only thing artificial about it will be the companies' boasts about the power of their software. -- Dina Bass
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