

Apple records and keeps users' Siri queries for up to 2 years - OGinparadise
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-siri-queries-20130419,0,7117017.story

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misnome
I'm not quite sure why it is surprising to people that Apple keep Siri data -
how else are they supposed to use the massive amounts of data to improve?

It sounds like it's not even voice data, but the questions and the answers
given. This would probably be useful for optimising for things people are
asking that siri is getting wrong?

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archangel_one
It's not surprising to me that they keep it, but they do not need to keep
personally identifying information for six months in order to do that. Seems a
little improper, and also unnecessary, for employees to have access to that
kind of thing if they're working on improving Siri.

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misnome
Hazarding a guess, history associated with a user could help accuracy or
determine usage that causes problems? I mean, sure, don't keep the user data
forever (and I imagine you can't, depending on local laws), but as long as
it's useful? Six months seems a reasonable timescale if you have to identify,
track, test and implement problems, and six months per user probably doesn't
give you a whole load of statistics on it's own.

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drivebyacct2
Presumably. Google even desires to keep the data personalized if you opt in
and allow them.

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glitch
Indeed. The more data points, the better. At least for speech recognition
personalization for Google Voice Search, it is opt-in:
[http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...](http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186263)

Not so long ago, the primary goal of the 1-800-GOOG-411 service was to record
people's voice queries for the purpose of bettering their voice recognition
technology. After they got sufficient data samples, they discontinued the
service.

[http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-
your...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your-
phonemes-539)

> "Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build
> a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database,
> in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech
> recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching."

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drivebyacct2
Fascinating. I had no idea that's what that service was being used for.
Interesting, it was more or less retired as soon as Android blew up and voice
search was everywhere.

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yoster
How else would Apple make Siri better? If they used no research on their
products, the end product would be a big failure. Apple maps on release, was
far from accurate. Apple maps now, a lot better.

