Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Thursday, April 11th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, yes, there are people listening in on some of your Alexa recordings, but it's complicated.

Jeff Bezos challenges competitors to pay their workers more.

The third big unicorn IPO of the year happened today and a rundown of noteworthy

recent startup raises. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Bloomberg has a piece up that describes Alexa's AI training process whereby

actual human workers transcribe voice clips generated by echo devices.

Those workers can apparently see customer account numbers related to the echo devices

and the audio they're transcribing and hear private conversations.

Quoting Bloomberg.

Amazon employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa Digital

Assistant powering its line of echo speakers.

The team listens to voice recordings captured in echo owners' homes and offices.

The recordings are transcribed, annotated, and then fed back into the software as a part of an effort to eliminate

gaps in Alex's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.

The Alexa Voice Review Process, described by seven people who have worked on the program,

highlights the often overlooked human role in training software algorithms.

In marketing materials, Amazon says Alexa, quote, lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter.

But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching,

end quote.

So Alexa allows Amazon contract employees to listen in on what you're saying in your home.

That's kind of the long and short of it, and that that sort of a scary elevator pitch headline generated

...