
Facebook Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio - minimaxir
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-paid-hundreds-of-contractors-to-transcribe-users-audio
======
areoform
> The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook’s
> Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were
> checking whether Facebook’s artificial intelligence correctly interpreted
> the messages, which were anonymized.

Where exactly is this setting? I've looked through Facebook's settings and
Messenger's settings, but this option is rarer than a cheap white truffle.
Does anyone know?

~~~
bryguy32403
[https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-
app/2271207603094031](https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-
app/2271207603094031)

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minimaxir
Unlike previous articles about tech-companies-listening-to-user-audio, this is
over voice transcription rather than smart speaker QA.

Facebook _does_ have a smart speaker (Portal) with voice commands
([https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/](https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/))
but that isn't mentioned in the article.

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cameronbrown
Paywall Workaround: [https://outline.com/pyzYAB](https://outline.com/pyzYAB)

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pmantas
Am I the only one who see’s a problem with them actively working to convert a
non-indexable data source into indexable and searchable one?

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kerng
Is it from WhatsApp audio conversations? Or just random recordings through the
apps - which Zuckerberg denied before?

~~~
Calvin02
RTFA - "The company said the users who were affected chose the option in
Facebook’s Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The
contractors were checking whether Facebook’s artificial intelligence correctly
interpreted the messages, which were anonymized."

~~~
dekhn
This sounds totally reasonable to me? Low quality machine learning algorithm
needs human labellers?

~~~
vokep
But why sample on realworld data from non-employees?

~~~
dekhn
Huh? Because that's the product you're trying to improve!

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sgt101
Is it fair to wonder why they are using people when automagical Ai
transcription should do this for them like the man from
Google/deepmind/amazon/IBM/Microsoft said? Or is FAIRs really not up to much?

~~~
ipsum2
Not exactly sure what you're asking, but all tech companies hire people to
transcribe audio precisely to gather data to train ML models to do
transcription.

~~~
derefr
Is there a reason that these ML models are being hoarded as "secret sauce"
when, for these companies, all the rivals they're concerned about _also_ have
all the resources required to build one that's nearly as good? It feels
strange that we've got six different tech giants that have all independently
spent tons of capital building up the training data required to sell people
smart speakers/mobile speech control/etc. with these ML models, without any of
them entering into cross-licensing agreements.

It seems like it'd make a lot more sense for Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook,
etc. to all pool their training data in an "industry working group" to build
and license out one "best" model, the way that IWGs are formed to build and
license out e.g. AV codecs.

~~~
Calvin02
> "to all pool their training data"

The press would skewer them alive and politicians will have a field day about
tech companies violating privacy and sharing data.

