Google Assistant and other voice assistants have recently come under fire over grading and other improvements programmes where the tech companies use humans to listen to voice recordings made by the digital assistants to gather feedback. Google is now implementing certain changes to make Google Assistant more conscious of user privacy. The company is letting existing Google Assistant users review their Voice & Audio Activity (VAA) setting and confirm their preference before any human review process resumes. It has also ensured "greater security protections" to the existing transcription process with an "extra layer of privacy filters" to overcome the current flaws -- at least to some extent.
To reveal all the new changes, Google[1] has published[2] a blog post highlighting the measures it is taking to protect user privacy.
"By default, we don't retain your audio recordings," writes Nino Tasca, Senior Product Manager, Google Assistant[3], in a blog post. "This has been the case, and will remain unchanged. You can still use the Assistant to help you throughout the day, and have access to helpful features like Voice Match."
In the list of new changes coming into force, Google has chosen to put the ability to opt-in for VAA on top. The company claims that it is updating its settings to highlight that when a user has turned on VAA, human reviewers may listen to their audio snippets to improve the existing speech technology. Users can review their VAA setting and confirm their preference.
"We won't include your audio in the human review process unless you've re-confirmed your VAA setting as on," asserts Tasca in the post.
The executive also mentions that audio snippets are "never associated with any user accounts" and are also...