Facebook hired outside contractors to transcribe Messenger audio clips

Facebook hired contractors to listen-in and transcribe Messenger voice chats to check its AI algorithms were accurately interpreting audio snippets

Facebook used hundreds of third-party contractors to listen to and transcribe recorded voice chats from users of its Messenger app.

That's according to Bloomberg, which revealed that Facebook hired contract workers to listen-in on the conversation in order to check whether the app's artificial intelligence algorithms were correctly interpreting anonymised audio snippets.

The individuals hired for the job were not told how those audio clips were obtained or who the speakers were in the voice messages.

But the contractors, speaking anonymously, told Bloomberg that they sometimes heard "vulgar content" in voice messages, but had no idea why the social networking company needed such audios transcribed.

When contacted by Bloomberg, a Facebook spokesperson admitted that the company hired third-party contractors to review audio clips from Messenger. The spokesperson also revealed that the company recently stopped the programme in light of criticism faced by other tech firms over similar issues.

"Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," Facebook told Bloomberg.

The transcription feature in Facebook Messenger was first introduced in 2015, although turned off by default. According to Facebook, only those users who opt to use the feature have their audio chats interpreted by the app.

But Facebook's support page doesn't indicate that the audio clips will be transcribed by humans. Moreover, if one user in the chat opts to enable the transcription feature, that will over-rule other users' settings in the audio message.

Facebook has faced intense scrutiny in recent years from public as well as regulatory agencies worldwide over its respect for users' privacy and personal data.

Last month, the US Federal Trade Commission approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the sharing of data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

However, the issue of data privacy is not linked with just Facebook. Other major tech firms, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are also facing criticism from public over similar practices.

Last week, some reports claimed that Apple used contractors to listen into and grade less than one per cent of Siri activations. The company said that it had stopped the programme, and that the feature will be offered as an option, and not enabled by default, in future.

Earlier this month, Microsoft admitted that its contractors were listening-in to some conversations conducted over Skype.

And in April, Amazon acknowledged that thousands of its workers listened-in on Alexa recordings and that the information gathered enabled it to better train its speech recognition systems.