Facebook's Portal smart home device is finally launching in the UK – but a human contractor might end up listening to your voice commands. The device, whose AI-equipped camera will follow users around the room in order to keep them in the frame during video calls, will be available to British consumers for the first time from Oct 15. Users will be able to make voice calls using Facebook Messenger and encrypted voice calls using WhatsApp, as well as watch Facebook's TV service in tandem with their friends. But Facebook admits up front that clips of the instructions given to Portal's voice assistant might be passed to human contractors to check whether they have been correctly interpreted by its speech recognition software – unless users explicitly opt out. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, said that Portal would never record the content of anyone's video calls, and that its "smart camera" software remains entirely on the device without any data being sent back to Facebook. "Getting the right people to help review voice transcripts makes the service a lot better," said Mr Bosworth.

Apple said it is now, by default, opting customers out of a program that listens to audio snippets scraped up by its voice-assistant, Siri. The company announced the decision in a blog post this week and marks the most significant step since it decided to suspend the program earlier this summer. Apple has been identified as one of many companies that was harvesting audio snippets from users in an effort to improve the accuracy of its voice-assistant. Unbeknownst to most, those snippets were then reviewed by human contractors. 'As a result of our review, we realize we haven't been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize,' wrote Apple. According to the company, it will will resume its program later this fall with several major changes.

Facebook has become the latest company to admit that human contractors listened to recordings of users without their knowledge, a practice the company now says has been "paused". Citing contractors who worked on the project, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that the company hired people to listen to audio conversations carried out on Facebook Messenger. The practice involved users who had opted in Messenger to have their voice chats transcribed, the company said. The contractors were tasked with re-transcribing the conversations in order to gauge the accuracy of the automatic transcription tool. "Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," a Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian.