Here's how tech giants handle data captured by voice assistants

Speaking to VentureBeat, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed they annotate a small number of recordings to improve Alexa's speech recognition and make the assistant better at understanding/answering queries.

The company gets the recordings reviewed by contractors for feature development but emphasizes that all of that happens in 'high confidentiality' with strict safeguards in place and without revealing personally-identifying information (only first name, device serial number).

Apple also gets a small number of Siri recordings reviewed by graders.

The data is encrypted and anonymized with random identifiers, which allows the graders to rate the quality of Siri's response and mark them with labels contributing to the assistant's development.

The labeled recordings are fed into Apple's recognition system, which ultimately ensures quality assurance and helps Siri better understand the user's voice.

A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat it employs "a wide range of techniques to protect user privacy" while transcribing Google Assistant data for training its speech recognition system.

The representative emphasized that the transcription process is automated and the analyzed audio data isn't associated with any personal information.

And, if the company chooses to use a third-party reviewer, only text data is shared.

As Microsoft's privacy page notes, the Redmond giant collects voice interactions with Cortana to enhance the voice assistant's ability to recognize individual speech patterns and respond.

However, the page doesn't detail how the company protects/anonymizes this data and if it is labeled by employees or third-party reviewers for development purposes.

Same is the case for Samsung which collects data from its Bixby voice assistant.