Apple is ‘sorry’ their workers listened to Siri voice recordings of users. The practice known as “grading” was used by tech firms as a way of improving the quality of speech recognition.
Apple, Google and Microsoft stopped ‘grading’ recently after the public came aware of the practice and were not happy. Apple have said they plan to continue the practice but with only siri users who allow them too. Apple also said that it will only be their own employees who will access the recording, they will no longer use third party workers.
Apple have now ended over 300 third party employees’ contracts as they will no longer be needed.
The company said that three main changes would take place before human grading of Siri recordings was resumed. It said:
- audio recordings would no longer be retained by default. Instead, Apple employees would rely on computer-generated transcripts of speech
- Siri users would be able to opt in to share audio recordings – and would be able to opt out “at any time”
- only Apple employees would have access to recordings, and any recordings that had been made “inadvertently” would be deleted
“We know that customers have been concerned by recent reports of people listening to audio Siri recordings as part of our Siri quality evaluation process – which we call grading,” Apple said.
“We heard their concerns, immediately suspended human grading of Siri requests and began a thorough review of our practices and policies… As a result of our review, we realise we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologise.”