Apple apologizes to Siri users for not 'fully living up to
their ideals' as well as enabling temporary workers to tune in to voice
recordings of Siri users so as to review them.
The announcement was made after a review of the grading
programme was finished, which had been triggered to reveal its existence with
the help of a Guardian report.
“As a result of our
review, we realise we have not been fully living up to our high ideals, and for
that we apologise, as we previously announced, we halted the Siri grading
program. We plan to resume later this fall when software updates are released
to our users.” Apple said in an unsigned statement posted to its website.
The company committed to three changes to the way Siri is
run after it resumes the grading programme:
- It will no longer keep audio recordings of Siri users by default, though it will retain automatically generated transcripts of the requests.
- Users will be able to opt in to sharing their recordings with Apple. “We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better,” the company said.
- Only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to those audio samples. The company had previously outsourced the work to contracting firms. Over the past two weeks, it has ended those contracts, resulting in hundreds of job losses around the world.
In the past six months, almost every significant producer of
voice-assistance technology has been 'revealed' to have been operating
human-oversight programs, having run them in discreetly for a considerable
length of time. Many out of them have sworn in to change their frameworks.
Amazon was the first to have been identified, then came
along Google and Microsoft, with the former pledging to review its safeguards
and the latter updating its privacy
policy.
