Alexa has dominated the smart speaker market with more than 100 million devices that have already been sold.
There are thousands of employees who are listening to voice recording data that gets captured by the smart devices in millions of homes. Why are they listening to the recordings? Because they are paid to transcribe that information and annotate them, the information then gets fed back to Amazon's software with the ultimate goal of using all of that data that gets collected to help improve human speech comprehension.
These are Amazon employees coming from different areas that might be listening to the recordings, many are contractors, but there are also full-time employees who are listening as well.
It's likely that there will be occasions when the device is going to record something, with the potential to be shared, that the speaker would probably prefer to be kept private. If they have difficulty with a particular recording that they might be trying to categorize, it's alleged that the team reviewing the recordings uses an internal chat room to communicate with each other and share files etc.
It's alleged that they have heard recordings that they themselves have found to be upsetting or potentially criminal.
Privacy issues have been a top concern surrounding these smart speaker devices since they came to market.
In one instance, a user had their private communications unintentionally recorded and then sent to a random individual on their contact lists without their permission.
Still, there might be a few owners of these devices out there who aren't aware that Amazon contractors will be listening to their intimate conversations that they might not have intended to record.