How can Siri, who doesn’t listen to you until you say ‘Hey Siri’, can hear you calling out if she’s not really listening? In fact, it has a very simple answer that will make you say ‘huh, so that’s it’. Let’s see together.
Voice assistants have only been in our lives for a few years. Although we are familiar with it from our phones in general, they are everywhere in almost every corner of the world, from smart home appliances to cars. And each has its own ‘magic word’ there is.
‘Hey Siri’ ‘Ok Google’ or Alexa… wakes up your dormant assistant and lets him listen to you. Okay, but if these voice assistants don’t listen to us all the time -which they are said to be – how come they hear when we call? That’s our question, now let’s move on to the answer.
As a matter of fact, your assistants listen to you 24/7… But there is no need to panic.
What we have to distinguish here is the difference between listening and recording and processing, sending it to the database. All voice assistants the ‘wake word’ referred to as the ‘wake word’ He is constantly listening to you to hear. That’s right here.
But in this listening process they are in a sort of sleep state and they’re just waiting for that word to start paying attention and recording.
Sometimes we are in a state between sleep and wakefulness. We hear voices, but our brains have begun to sleep. The sounds we hear do not mean anything to us, we do not attach meaning to them. But at that moment, if our mother calls out to us, ‘What happened?’ we can sober up in panic. We can actually compare the situation of voice assistants until they hear the wake-up words.
After hearing their names, they wake up and begin to serve you by perceiving the command you say, sending it to the database and processing it.
So Siri, Although he hears the sounds in the environment until you call him, he doesn’t actually listen.. In that state, the only sound it’s programmed to detect is the ‘magic word’ you call it.
Bigger ‘eavesdropping’ scandals have surfaced in the past regarding voice assistants
After ‘waking’ them to voice assistants working with artificial intelligence, every command is recorded, transferred to the database, processed and applied. So actually The main ‘rest’ issue happens after you give the command and wake your assistant.
Some news on this subject in recent years, data recorded by Alexa and Google Assistant, He revealed that he was listened to by Amazon and Google employees. Making a statement after the news companies confirmed the situation. However, they stated that only a small part of the audio recordings were listened to. for example Google said it was only 0.02%. Amazon, on the other hand, talked about a rate at this level again.
As a reason for listening, they cited the improvement of artificial intelligence’s efforts to process data and deliver better results. Artificial intelligence develops not on its own, but with information coming from humans, especially when it comes to language development, it needs the sentences we use. able to deliver more consistent and realistic results ‘like a human’ part is correct.
In fact, in our video above about artificial intelligence, we asked this subject to a Google employee, software engineer and data scientist Merve Noyan, and she said that artificial intelligence how to talk like a human We got answers about the process.
However, for this development process, listening to the voice recordings of people by other people working in the companies was on the agenda and created a controversy, Google, Apple and Amazon made a statement. suspends ‘human review’ of user records explained.
So what happened as a result, are our data and audio recordings safe?
As ordinary users, it is normal for us to experience such unease. Not a day goes by that giant companies do not experience data leaks… Because of these data leaks, many people’s data is compromised over and over again. To rest or to record our footprint on the Internet; This means that data may one day be leaked as well.
This being the case, it is not surprising that our minds are blurred when companies make such statements. However, especially In the last few years, states have made great strides in this regard. and critical decisions were taken in terms of privacy and protection of personal data. Technology giants are also cornered on many issues and now it’s harder for them to use our data.
At this point, what we can do as users is to be a conscious internet and technology user. Apps we download stop and think a little more while she cracks the permitsavoiding sharing our data with untrusted sources, reviewing all the permissions we have control over the devices and apps of giants like Google and Apple…