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Amazon workers allegedly have a chat room about ‘amusing’ recordings?!

Bloomberg have a report out that highlighted the human labour that goes into manufacturing and improving the Amazon Echo. Amazon have contractors and full time employees working on the Amazon Echo. They’re all over the globe and tasked with reviewing and transcribing clips. Clips that are of conversations between users and Alexa. According to the report from Bloomberg, humans are said to annotate interactions to help identify phrases. Phrases such as “Taylor Swift” that might otherwise be meaningless to the software.

“We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it,”an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg.

Amazon Echo Chat Room

According Bloomberg, as a result of collating all this data, Amazon workers have a chat room. This chat room is intended for asking for help if they can’t make out a word or phrase. However, allegedly, they also share “amusing” recordings. Furthermore, an Amazon worker, told Bloomberg that each member of the team will listen to as much as 100 clips a day. Clips that Alexa has mistaken or unintentionally activated. Bloomberg have reported that one of these workers will review as many as 1,000 clips in a day! (A full 9hr working day shift)

In cases where the Alexa has tripped unintentionally, there has also been some serious recordings. According to the report, two workers who have spoken to Bloomberg. Who believe they heard a sexual assault taking place. Furthermore another two workers told Bloomberg that they were given guidance not to intervene. As Amazon didn’t consider it the company’s place to intervene in cases like these.

Full report with Bloomberg here

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Episode 317 Whiskey With Alexa Ft. Glassmates

Pure StreamR

What's in the box? Pure StreamR

The Pure StreamR carries a bit of weight behind it and for good reason. The sound on this little device is very very impressive! It has a HUGE kick in the bass and we love that!

Posted by How To Kill an Hour on Thursday, 16 January 2020

We love our music here at How To Kill An Hour, so we’re always on the lookout for fantastic pieces of kit. One of which is portable speakers. We’re huge fans of Pure, so when we saw the Pure StreamR it was a speaker we just had to check out.

Upon taking it out of the box, we discovered it is a very small device. But it is hefty. It carries a bit of weight behind it and for good reason. The sound on this little device is very very impressive! It has a HUGE kick in the bass and we love that! It’s the perfect speaker to take out and about with you.

It’s portable so has Bluetooth streaming on it, so you can play all of your favourite music from Apple Music or Spotify. Furthermore, why not play your favorite podcasts while on the go? *cough cough*

Not only that the Pure StreamR has digital DAB radio built in as well as Alexa voice technology! Furthermore the speaker is 360 degrees, so wherever you’re sitting you will enjoy powerful, crystal clear sound. The StreamR is one of the few bluetooth speakers to offer Alexa too. The onboard microphone connects to the Pure Home App on your smartphone via bluetooth. Then it will connect to Alexa using Wifi or mobile data. Therefore allowing you to have access to Alexa, wherever you are! Ask her for the weather, your schedule or even play a playlist.

With the Pure Home App you can also customise your speaker settings and be notified of software updates. So you’ll never miss a beat!

Pure have also added an aux-in cable, so for those not wanting to use bluetooth, this is the speaker for you! The Aux cable also acts as an antenna for the digital radio! How cool is that?!

The sound fills the room and sounds just as good outdoors and with a 15 hour battery life, you simply cannot go wrong.

(Pure)

Pure Home app: Apple / Android

Purchase a Pure StreamR by clicking here!

Keep up to date with everything How To Kill An Hour by signing up to our newsletter by clicking here!

Let us know what you think of the show by clicking here!

Click here to subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see more amazing ways to kill time!

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Episode 231 – Amazon Alexa Game BOSCH