Inc. defended the privacy features of its Alexa digital assistant -- and introduced some new tools to reassure users – following months of debate about the practices of the technology giant and its largest competitors. The company plans to roll out a feature that lets users of the Alexa voice-based assistant automatically delete their verbal recordings regularly, on a rolling three-month and 18-month basis. Previously, Alexa users had to manually delete their stored voice recordings on a companion website. "We care about this," Dave Limp, the leader of Amazon's devices and services business, said of privacy during a press event at the company's headquarters in Seattle. "Privacy is absolutely foundational to everything that we do in and around Alexa."

When Amazon customers speak to Alexa, the company's AI-powered voice assistant, they may be heard by more people than they expect, according to a report. Amazon employees around the world regularly listen to recordings from the company's smart speakers as part of the development process for new services, Bloomberg News reports. Some transcribe artist names, linking them to specific musicians in the company's database; others listen to the entire recorded command, comparing it with what the automated systems heard and the response they offered, in order to check the quality of the company's software. Technically, users have given permission for the human verification: the company makes clear that it uses data "to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems", and gives users the chance to opt out. But the company doesn't explicitly say that the training will involve workers in America, India, Costa Rica, and more nations around the world listening to those recordings.

Yes, someone might listen to your Alexa conversations someday. A Bloomberg report has detailed how Amazon employs thousands of full-timers and contractors from around the world to review audio clips from Echo devices. Apparently, these workers transcribe and annotate recordings, which they then feed back into the software to make Alexa smarter than before. The process helps beef up the voice AI's understanding of human speech, especially for non-English-speaking countries or for places with distinctive regional colloquialisms. In French, for instance, an Echo speaker could hear avec sa ("with his" or "with her") as "Alexa" and treat it as a wake word.