Loading summary
Transcript129 lines
- [00:00]
Jeff Adams
AI is rewriting the business playbook with productivity boosts and faster decision making coming to every industry. If you're not thinking about AI, you can bet your competition is. This is not where you want to drop the ball, but AI requires a lot of compute power and with most cloud platforms, the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on oci. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure this was the cloud built for AI, a blazing, fast, enterprise grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps and all your AI workloads. OCI costs 50% less than other major hyperscalers for compute, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking. Thousands of businesses have already scored with oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI. Now the ball's in your court.
- [00:45]
Brad Stone
Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.
- [00:54]
Greg Hart
See if your company qualifies for this.
- [00:55]
Brad Stone
Special offer@oracle.com strategic that's oracle.com strategic from.
- [01:00]
Greg Hart
Providing extra support during busy seasons to replacing vacant roles, it's time to choose Express employment professionals to manage your workforce. Express can handle everything from contract placements to finding the right full time team member. Go to expresspros.com solve your workforce challenges when you choose Express to support your hiring in a variety of roles, including two of our biggest manufacturing and logistics. Visit expresspros.com today. Jeff Adams is a computer scientist. In 2011, he was at a really tiny startup, just 13 employees called Yap. They were working on technology that could transcribe voicemail into text messages. And then one day, Jeff's fairy godmother showed up in the form of executives from Amazon.
- [01:47]
Jeff Adams
We went to a show and some people from Amazon came and talked to us and they might be interested in possibly even acquiring us. And I thought, that's absurd. What could Amazon possibly be interested in speech for? Maybe they want you to be able to, you know, call up on the phone and order a book.
- [02:05]
Greg Hart
Jeff figured the talks wouldn't amount to much, but over the course of the next few months, they became serious. Naturally, he wanted to know why Amazon was interested.
- [02:15]
Jeff Adams
They said, you know, don't ask. It's our business. And I thought, well, it's going to be my business too, and you might want to know whether we can do it. But they wouldn't. They wouldn't say anything. They said, I'm sorry, we're not at liberty to discuss any of this.
- [02:29]
Greg Hart
There was one hint that Amazon would.
- [02:31]
Jeff Adams
Give so one of the things they did let us know was that the guy who was kind of running this was Greg Hart, who we knew was the right hand person of Jeff Bezos. So they go to all the meetings with them. They are like the confidant, the consigliere, whatever. And so we knew, okay, something, this does have visibility at the highest levels and Bezos must be behind it in some form.
- [02:56]
Greg Hart
As the deal was being finalized, Jeff's team traveled to Florence, Italy, to a computer speech conference along with several Amazon managers. They even stayed in a villa together. But the Amazon people didn't want to be seen with the voice transcription people during the conference.
- [03:12]
Jeff Adams
From day to day in the conference, we had to let. I rented a van and we drove down into town and to the conference together. I had to let them out around the block, around the cor.
- [03:24]
Greg Hart
It's like being a teenager and trying to hide the person you're dating from your parents.
- [03:28]
Jeff Adams
First of all, they didn't want anyone to know that they were from Amazon. They didn't want anyone to see them with us. So we had to avoid them at the conference. We would like, you know, look at each other and kind of smile from across the room or across the courtyard or whatever, but we couldn't sit together, we couldn't talk together or whatever.
- [03:45]
Greg Hart
That fall, the deal was done. Amazon buys the speech company, and Jeff is still living in mystery.
- [03:52]
Jeff Adams
We had been employees of Amazon for like a week, but they had still not told us anything. They said, no, we have to tell you in a closed room. So we all came out to Seattle. We all got in the room together. They closed the door, locked the door, put paper over the window in the door, closed the exterior windows. It was very secret, very mysterious, and hush hush.
- [04:18]
Greg Hart
Jeff and his team leaned forward. This was the moment they said, imagine.
- [04:24]
Jeff Adams
Something the size of a Coke can that's sitting on your table, and we're gonna sell this for $15, $20, and people will be able to talk to it. And we thought, you know, we can't do this. The technology isn't there yet. It doesn't exist yet.
- [04:40]
Greg Hart
And of course, they did do it by inventing the technology, because the product they're talking about becomes Amazon's AI virtual assistant. And that $20 Coke can is the Echo smart speaker. Though it ends up selling for more than $20. Alexa is one of Amazon's first forays into artificial intelligence. And it would bring Amazon into people's living rooms, further weaving it into their lives. You're listening to foundering I'm your host Brad Stone. In this episode we we're going to tell the story of the creation of Alexa, how Jeff Bezos almost single handedly conceived the idea for a voice activated computer and drove the device's creation. Alexa helped to solidify Amazon's image as an innovator and in the process challenged conventional notions of privacy. We'll tell you more after a quick break.
- [05:45]
Brad Stone
This show is sponsored by Better Help.
- [05:48]
Greg Hart
BetterHelp has been revolutionary in connecting people to mental health services.
- [05:52]
Brad Stone
Using BetterHelp can be as easy as opening your laptop or your phone and.
- [05:57]
Greg Hart
Clicking a button and the session begins. Clients are able to choose in what way they would like to communicate with me. Whether video or on the phone or.
- [06:06]
Brad Stone
Chat texting, BetterHelp is there when you need it. And that's what makes all the difference. Visit betterhelp.com podbusiness to get 10% off your first month. Therapists were compensated. Your customers are important to you, but they won't feel that way if they're stuck messaging a clunky chatbot or waiting on hold for a representative.
- [06:29]
Greg Hart
Estimated wait time is 25 minutes.
- [06:37]
Brad Stone
With Sierra, your company can deploy a branded AI agent that engages and delights customers anytime, anywhere. Sierra agents pick up every phone call and personalize every interaction. No more menus, no more hold times. And if you have an issue, Sierra's AI agents solve tough problems, whether they're helping your customer pick out the perfect mattress, update a subscription plan, or even troubleshoot a new device. Always friendly, always helpful, always ready, always visit Sierra AI to learn more. That's Sierra AI.
- [07:20]
Greg Hart
In the last episode, we talked about how Amazon survived the dot com bust. How Jeff Bezos said to colleagues, the only way out of this is to invent our way out. During those next few years, Bezos launched Amazon prime and the Kindle. But there's another innovation from this era, one that generates huge profits for Amazon and sets the stage for the creation of its pioneering voice assistant. It's Amazon's cloud service called aws, or Amazon Web Services. It's the most difficult of Bezos inventions for laypeople to understand, because as much as it may already seem like Amazon is everywhere. A massive store, a network of warehouses, and a fleet of delivery people. There's one more way in which Amazon is ubiquitous, indispensable. Amazon is literally holding up much of the Internet today. AWS is a highly profitable $50 billion annual business for Amazon. When you watch Netflix, you're often streaming video from Amazon. When you send a Snapchat you're using Amazon servers. By 2010, Bezos was asking everyone in the company, what are you doing for aws? He wanted Amazon to deepen and exploit the early lead it already had in running massive cutting edge data centers. Around this time, he was at lunch with Greg Hart, the guy described as his consigliere. And the conversation turned to how Google was starting to let people search just by talking into their smartphones. Here's Greg.
- [08:48]
Ahmed Bouzid
And I said, and look at how convenient it is. And I just did a Google voice search on Pizza Near Me. And you know, it's just so much faster than actually typing, you know, with your fingers or your thumbs. Pizza Near Me on your phone, waiting for results to come back.
- [09:03]
Greg Hart
Now, Bezos has long been a believer in voice. Here he is all the way back in the year 2000 talking to Charlie Rose.
- [09:10]
Jeff Bezos
I believe that for mobile commerce, the thing that's going to be the biggest part of that is voice. And I think there's a lot that can happen. In the short term it'll be kind of a stilted special purpose language for talking to Amazon.com, but in the long term it could even be natural language processing. I think that is a real mind bender.
- [09:32]
Greg Hart
Now, a decade later, it seemed like this early prediction might come true. A few weeks after their fateful lunch, Bezos sent an email to Greg that read, we should build a $20 device with its brains in the cloud that's completely controlled by your voice. The central insight here was that the product could be inexpensive because its brains resided in Amazon's data centers and could be constantly improved. So if you buy it, the product would be upgrading itself and you wouldn't even know it. A few weeks later, Greg started recruiting people inside the company for the project. He proceeded with total secrecy. The only thing he told colleagues was that it had the potential to be bigger than the Kindle.
- [10:12]
Ahmed Bouzid
And at the time that seemed like laughable that we could create something that could be bigger than Kindle. Because Kindle at that time was now four years into its life, dominating the E Reader and E Ink market and was changing the way that people thought about reading.
- [10:30]
Greg Hart
Next, Greg acquired yap, the speech recognition company where Jeff Adams worked. That team didn't think he knew what he was doing either. Amazon wanted people to be able to talk to a device across a room and have it understand them. That's called far field speech recognition, and the technology for it didn't exist. Here's Jeff Adams again.
- [10:50]
Jeff Adams
The big problem is speech recognition at the time really relied On a close talking microphone, you needed to capture the speech close to the person's mouth. And they were talking about, oh, I'm going to be in the garage and this thing's going to coach me through changing my car's oil and it's going to be over on the other side of the garage and I'm going to be shouting things to it and it's going to be shouting instructions back or whatever. And we thought, you can't do that. There's too many reflective surfaces in the room that are going to mess up the audio.
- [11:22]
Greg Hart
Basically, if you're shouting across the room, that introduces lots of echo and the computer gets confused.
- [11:28]
Jeff Adams
So I realized that this far field issue was going to be a problem. I didn't want to say anything in front of the group. I didn't want to appear unsupportive. But afterwards I tracked down Greg Hart in the hallway and I said, greg, we're excited about this, but I think you should know that what you want to do, the technology isn't there yet. It doesn't exist yet. We don't have that technology to solve this far field speech problem. And he was unflapped. He said, I appreciate that, thank you for telling me, but solve it. We are Amazon. We've got resources. Hire as many people as you need. Take as long as you want, but, you know, solve the problem.
- [12:10]
Greg Hart
The team gave itself the codename Doppler, as in the Doppler effect, which describes the way a sound wave moves with respect to a listener. They hotly debated everything from what to name the device to what it should do to how to market that to the public. At first, they met with Bezos once a month.
- [12:28]
Ahmed Bouzid
He would get deeply involved in the technology, not just the business or the product, but deeply involved in the technology. He, I would say he stayed very close to the project throughout. As the project progressed, those meetings would increase in frequency. And by the end we were meeting with him. You know, leading up to launch, I would say there probably wasn't a day that went by that we didn't have at least one meeting with Jeff. And, you know, sometimes there were multiple meetings with Jeff in a single day. That is both a blessing and a curse.
- [13:03]
Greg Hart
The blessing came in the form of money. The team could spend whatever they needed to break through the technical obstacles.
- [13:10]
Ahmed Bouzid
This is a big project that Jeff is personally invested in. It was his idea originally. He can be very demanding, he can push to teams, but at the same time being able to go through that experience and have his brain on your side is an immensely powerful opportunity and experience if you let it, if you get really frustrated by it, and at times some of the people on my product team would say it feels like. Jeff is the product manager for Alexa.
- [13:43]
Greg Hart
Bezos set the vision for Alexa. He wanted it to be the Star Trek computer. He pictured a versatile conversational machine that could respond to any question. You should be able to sit in your living room and ask Alexa anything. It sounds simple, but it's not. Because they needed a lot of data to train the AI algorithms. For example, for Alexa to tell you the weather, it would have to understand the phrasing of your question and your dialect from across a noisy room and sort through databases for the right answer. This would take Alexa a step further than Siri or Google Voice, which only worked when you spoke directly into your phone. But the Alexa team just didn't have the data to get the AI smart. The early prototypes worked so badly that even Amazon employees didn't really want to test them. Bezos was getting impatient. He actually walked out of a number of internal meetings in frustration. Then Greg and his colleagues struck upon an idea they called Project Amped.
- [14:41]
Ahmed Bouzid
Basically rent houses or apartments in cities all over the US and we would put devices in those apartments. They were all camouflaged. And they were not just Amazon devices. There were other companies devices there as well, some of which were visible, some of which were not visible.
- [14:59]
Greg Hart
And characteristic of all Amazon projects, secrecy was the priority. Employees were careful to conceal Amazon's identity when they set up the room.
- [15:08]
Ahmed Bouzid
And that was all about obfuscation. We didn't want people to understand what company we were working for. And so you could see an Xbox, you could see this, you could see that. And then we would have all these Alexa devices hidden throughout the room, or Echo devices, prototype devices, and then they brought in testers.
- [15:26]
Greg Hart
Thousands of people paid an hourly wage, coming in at all hours of the day and days of the week to train the machines.
- [15:32]
Ahmed Bouzid
Then we would bring in, we would recruit participants, have people with different accents, you know, male, female, different ages, who would come in. And we would ask them to do a mixture of reading scripted things and then also talking in a much more off the cuff, a la carte fashion, to ask for things that people would be, we hoped, asking.
- [15:54]
Greg Hart
Alexa, when we launched Amazon, conducted the data gathering effort with such stealth that neighbors started to get suspicious.
- [16:01]
Ahmed Bouzid
A house that we rented in Boston, that the neighbors thought that because we had a lot of cars showing up and individuals getting out on their own and coming in and spending, I Think maybe an hour. And so there's a lot of sort of transient in and out traffic. And neighbors thought that maybe there was a drug running ring or something else going on. And so the police actually showed up.
- [16:23]
Greg Hart
Despite the attention from police, Bezos loved the inventiveness of the data gathering program.
- [16:29]
Ahmed Bouzid
When we first took AMP to him, his response was effectively like, now you're talking. Like, let's do this. Like, tell me if you want more money.
- [16:41]
Greg Hart
Greg says that project amped ran in 13 cities and included over 10,000 people.
- [16:46]
Ahmed Bouzid
The devices were placed all over the room. And so we were trying to capture a massive amount of acoustic data about, you know, how noise performs in a room in all kinds of different rooms, in bedrooms, in living rooms, in kitchens, in bathrooms.
- [17:01]
Greg Hart
And the result, Amazon basically solved the far field voice problem. It took six months for this company to solve a problem that had stumped speech scientists for decades. But since the project was top secret, they weren't able to tell anyone, not even the speech science community, about their big technological breakthrough. Here's Ahmed Bouzid. He had been working in voice technology for almost 20 years. When Amazon tried to recruit him, he in early 2015, I turned them down.
- [17:31]
Nina Raleigh
I said, you're not showing me anything. You have never done anything in voice, and you're telling me that you are going to, and you want me to go from D.C. and go to Seattle. And they're like, just trust us. No, no, I don't think so. I mean, I've seen the Kindle and it's fine, it's okay. But Kindle is like, you know, it's a toy compared to what you guys are trying to do. So anyway, I said no, twice.
- [17:54]
Greg Hart
Eventually, they flew Amit out to Amazon headquarters to see Alexa in person.
- [17:59]
Nina Raleigh
So it was, you know, on the table. And so the first thing I did is I asked it for music. Can you play some Miles Davis? And it did. I'm like, okay, cool. And then I said, you know, what time is it? And it stopped and told me the time. And then he continued playing Miles Davis, which was great.
- [18:16]
Greg Hart
Interacting with Alexa was almost a moving moment for Ahmed. He felt like decades of scientific research had been realized in this little device.
- [18:25]
Nina Raleigh
And I, you know, I was like, okay, this is amazing. This is amazing. This is clearly an important moment in technology. And this is what I've been doing all my life, right? Solving the problem of speech. You know, we people who are in the speech world are always saying this expression, you know, speech is around the corner. We've been saying it since the mid-90s, speech is around the corner because we do believe that if you do speech well, a lot of stuff becomes easier to do for people.
- [18:51]
Greg Hart
Ahmed was particularly impressed by two innovations that Amazon made. One, that they solved the far field speech issue. And secondly, Alexa was fast.
- [19:02]
Nina Raleigh
The speed, right? The fact that I was just amazed, like, how the hell does it come back within like two seconds? I mean, if I type, you know, if I want to launch a page on my browser, it takes like sometimes like 3, 4, 5 seconds, right? How is, how the hell is this thing doing all of these things? Getting my voice going to the cloud, processing it, coming back, talking back within two seconds. It's like a magic. Even for someone like me who has been like, we should be jaded by now, by. By then, right? Oh, okay. I know exactly how it's happened. I was astonished, right? How the hell did they do that?
- [19:39]
Greg Hart
We'll be right back.
- [19:50]
Brad Stone
Your customers are important to you, but they won't feel that way if they're stuck messaging a clunky chatbot or waiting on hold for a representative. Estimated wait time is 25 minutes. With Sierra, your company can deploy a branded AI agent that engages and delights customers anytime, anywhere. Sierra agents pick up every phone call and personalize every interaction. No more menus, no more hold times. And if you have an issue, Sierra's AI agents solve tough problems, whether they're helping your customer pick out the perfect mattress, update a subscription plan, or even troubleshoot a new device. Always friendly, always helpful, always ready, always visit Sierra AI to learn more. That's Sierra AI. This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was dealing with piles of paperwork and frustrating forms and then waiting and wondering and worrying if you were going to get any money back. Now taxes is easily uploading your forms to a TurboTax expert who's matched to your unique tax situation. An expert who's backed by the latest technology which cross checks millions of Data points for 100% accuracy. While they work on your taxes, you get real time updates on their progress and you get the most money back guaranteed. All while you go about your day. No stressing, no worrying, no waiting. Now this is taxes intuit turbotax get an expert now on turbotax.com only available with TurboTax live full service real time updates only on iOS mobile app. See guarantee details@turbotax.com guarantees.
- [21:49]
Greg Hart
I want to take a moment to address Amazon's obsessive secrecy. Many companies are secretive, but tech companies today have the eyes of the world on them. So they are taking corporate secrecy to a whole other level, like that story Jeff Adams, the speech scientist, told that the Amazon executives were so secretive when they acquired his company that they wouldn't even be seen together at a conference. That's typical of Amazon. This intense drive for secrecy comes straight from Jeff Bezos. He wants to tightly control the messaging around Amazon's new products. The idea is that complete secrecy pays off with a surprising, almost magical reveal once the product is launched. That meant keeping Alexa under wraps until launch, preserving the details of how it actually worked, and choosing the perfect voice. Here's Greg Hart.
- [22:41]
Ahmed Bouzid
How do you define the characteristics that you want the voice to have? And so there was sort of a brief that we wrote up about the qualities. You wanted the person to be knowledgeable. We very quickly, early on, decided the first voice would be female. We knew there would be additional voices, but we felt that the first voice should be female, in part because. Yeah, so that's the logical question. Why? In part because we knew that the device would be in the kitchen, and we felt that a female voice would be more open and inviting and warm than a male voice would be in that environment and more appropriate in that environment. Not because of any sexist things, but just because of the fact that we knew the way that it's the right way to say this. We had seen evidence that people respond differently to male computer voices than to female computer voices, and they respond more positively to female computer voices. And we wanted, because the device was in the home, we wanted it to be a device that. That everybody would respond positively to.
- [23:49]
Greg Hart
Putting a female voice in the kitchen, so to speak, would turn out to be a somewhat controversial choice. And Amazon isn't the only company to do this. Siri, Google Voice, and Microsoft Cortana are all women by default. So Amazon moved forward in their search for a voice. They contracted with the same studio that had developed the voice of Siri for Apple.
- [24:11]
Brad Stone
Okay, I set up your meeting with David tomorrow. Shall I schedule it?
- [24:15]
Greg Hart
Who is voiced by Susan Bennett, a career voice actress?
- [24:19]
Brad Stone
Hi, my name is Susan Bennett and I'm a voice actor and the original voice of Siri.
- [24:25]
Greg Hart
So to find their Alexa, the studio had half a dozen female voice actresses read for hours. They read entire books and random articles. And finally, Greg Hart and Jeff Bezos picked one. One woman. Her identity hasn't been revealed in all this time. It's amazing to me as an Amazon reporter that Amazon has still been able to keep the voice of Alexa a secret. In 2020, I started canvassing voiceover actors asking if they knew the identity of Alexa. No one knew. Finally, I got a tip from someone who had worked with the studio that Amazon contracted with. And they said that Alexa was voiced by an actress and singer from Boulder, Colorado named Nina Raleigh. I reached out to Raleigh numerous times. She wouldn't confirm that she's the voice of Alexa, but she didn't deny it either. Eventually, I confirmed with enough people that I feel confident she's the one. She's Alexa. Here's a clip from her website in an ad that she did for Time Warner Cable.
- [25:26]
Brad Stone
Thanks for choosing Time Warner. Now that you've ordered your installation, let's set up a time to get a crew over to your place.
- [25:34]
Greg Hart
And here's Alexa.
- [25:35]
Brad Stone
Time Warner Cable, also simply known as Time Warner, was an American cable television company. It was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States.
- [25:44]
Greg Hart
But imagine what it might be like to be Nina Raleigh. Your voice is piped into millions of homes every day. Each new iteration of Alexa, each update for Amazon, you have to record something new. Like when Amazon Fresh released a product called the Single Cow Burger, she had to be available.
- [26:02]
Brad Stone
Single Cow Burger, A beef burger made with meat from just a single cow.
- [26:06]
Greg Hart
She's chained. To Alexa, it sounds like a life of obscurity and loneliness. Compare that to Siri and Susan Bennett. She's spoken on CNN and countless talk shows. She's even been able to use her fame as the voice of Siri as leverage for many more opportunities. Craig saw the burden that Amazon's secrecy put on the human behind the voice of Alexa.
- [26:30]
Ahmed Bouzid
I never met her and I don't even know that. I might have spoken with her once, but I never met her. And it would be interesting to be in her shoes now, because on the one hand, it's incredible that this thing that you contributed to is now so ubiquitous. On the other hand, I would think it would be maybe a little bit unsettling.
- [26:55]
Greg Hart
Amazon introduced The Echo in November 2014.
- [26:59]
Jeff Adams
When it first arrived from Amazon, I.
- [27:01]
Greg Hart
Didn'T know what it was with a YouTube video.
- [27:04]
Ahmed Bouzid
Alexa, play rock music.
- [27:06]
Brad Stone
Rock music.
- [27:10]
Greg Hart
Alexa, stop.
- [27:11]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
Wait. I want to try.
- [27:13]
Greg Hart
Alexa, what time is it?
- [27:14]
Brad Stone
The time is 3:27. You actually don't have to yell at it.
- [27:18]
Greg Hart
Okay. It uses far field technology, so it can hear you from anywhere in the room.
- [27:22]
Ahmed Bouzid
So it can just hear you anywhere.
- [27:24]
Greg Hart
Yes, that promise was enough. A responsive computer that can tell the time or the weather, play music, and answer questions from across the room. Tens of thousands of people joined a waiting list to receive A device. Here's Bezos at the Recode technology conference in 2016, saying that the future is Alexa. He's speaking to Walt Mossberg.
- [27:46]
Jeff Bezos
But it has been a dream ever since, you know, people started, you know, in the early days of science fiction, to have a computer that you can talk to.
- [27:54]
Greg Hart
So are you deeply committed to this becoming a huge part of your business and what you do?
- [28:00]
Jeff Bezos
Absolutely. We've been working on it. You know, we worked on it. We have more than a thousand people dedicated just to Alexa and the Echo ecosystem. And it's a. And there's so much more to come.
- [28:12]
Greg Hart
Bezos was deploying his Playbook for experiments that produced promising sparks. He poured gasoline on them. Amazon ramped up hiring. The Alexa team ballooned to 10,000 employees. And Bezos paid around $10 million for the company's first ever super bowl ad, starring Alec Baldwin and Missy Elliott. Alexa, stop how you do that.
- [28:37]
Jeff Adams
It's my Amazon Echo. I can stream music, order things, and watch this. Alexa, turn on the lights.
- [28:48]
Greg Hart
Wow. Inside, the company, employees noticed that he seemed to take real joy in the work.
- [28:54]
Nina Raleigh
Here's Ahmed Jeff, you know, the CEO and the guy in charge was, I would say he was obsessed with Alexa. How many. He had this saying that I am happiest. He used to say this, I'm happiest when I'm working on Alexa. And so he. It was. His favorite time of the day is to meet with the Alexa team and work on Alexa. So he was directly involved.
- [29:18]
Greg Hart
In the early days, Bezos was frequently asked about Privacy. At the 2016 Code Conference, he promised to be a good steward of the sensitive personal data that Alexa was sure to pick up, this is going to get much deeper into our lives.
- [29:34]
Brad Stone
Yeah.
- [29:35]
Greg Hart
So what are the privacy.
- [29:37]
Jeff Bezos
I think that if you take the totality of, you know, privacy and our ability to store large amounts of information, to use it in ways that customers actually do want us to use it. So there are benefits. And I think one of the things that you have to do is when you collect and store data, you have to be clear about what you're doing. You have to. And not just, you know, subsection 17, paragraph 3. Clearly, as you can see in our privacy policy, we were allowed to do that, but you have to figure out ways to be kind of obviously clear.
- [30:11]
Greg Hart
He stood on stage and promised that the privacy policy would be obviously clear. What he wasn't saying was that Alexa was so smart, in part because there were real life humans listening through the machines, helping to craft many of Alexa's answers. And to fix its errors by listening to what a subset of users said, the company kept Alexa owners in the dark about how this aspect of their devices worked. Ruthie hoped Slatus was as one of those people being paid to listen. Several years ago, she saw an ad from a temp agency seeking someone with an English or journalism degree. They offered $12 an hour to transcribe audio recordings.
- [30:51]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
There was kind of a generic ad on Craigslist. I don't think it mentioned Amazon at all.
- [30:57]
Greg Hart
She applied. She passed a security check and a grammar test, and then she was let in on her task. She would listen to conversations picked up by the Echo's microphones and type them up and then feed the information back into Amazon's system. She said it seemed like a good job at first.
- [31:15]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
We heard the customer using it and, you know, ordering flour and asking what time it was and asking to be told a joke and so forth. And it seemed pretty cool. I mean, a little invasive, for sure, but pretty cool overall.
- [31:29]
Greg Hart
Ruthie was there to make Alexa's responses seem more nuanced, more intuitive, more human. This was right around the time Amazon started selling the Echo to customers on a limited basis. She assumed at first that the folks she was listening to had signed up to help improve Amazon's speech recognition software and knew that someone might be listening.
- [31:52]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
Who were all of these, all of these many, many voices and people? Were they various people who worked for Amazon who agreed to bring this home? Were they, you know, but then if they were, would they really be ordering sex toys, you know, and talking dirty to it, and all of the grotesque things that we occasionally heard?
- [32:15]
Greg Hart
Almost immediately, it was clear to Ruthie that people liked to toy with Alexa in ways that Amazon maybe didn't intend.
- [32:22]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
What can we ask her? How will she respond if we abuse her, if we talk dirty to her, if we ask her to marry us, if we, you know, that sort of thing?
- [32:32]
Greg Hart
Most of the sexual stuff seemed innocuous enough.
- [32:35]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
99,9% of it wasn't disturbing. You know, it was sometimes humorous and sometimes, you know, kind of silly or weird or entertaining even, you know, like somebody trying to figure out what kind of dildo to order or something like.
- [32:51]
Greg Hart
That, you know, but sometimes it did get disturbing if it was a man.
- [32:57]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
Who was talking to her, like he would talk in an abusive way to a woman, like you could hear it in his voice.
- [33:07]
Greg Hart
And she wondered if men were being so rude, in part because Alexa was female and being a woman, even an AI woman, meant that Alexa would be on the receiving end of misogyny. Even children did this.
- [33:20]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
There were a lot of kids who would talk abusively to her, and it felt as though they were exercising some sort of anger that they had toward their parent or their teacher or something like that. There was a lot of psychology that I thought was fascinating.
- [33:38]
Greg Hart
Ruthie felt like the way people spoke to Alexa was so private, so intimate. They would never ever speak like this if they knew someone was listening.
- [33:47]
Ruthie Hopes Slatus
They're in their private home. They think that no one will ever hear the words that are coming out of their mouth. Ever know that they're talking to a robot, but at the same time they're speaking to a robot as though it's a sentient being.
- [34:03]
Greg Hart
Ruthie's job was a secret. It wouldn't become public until years later that people like her were helping to improve the software by analyzing real Alexa recordings. My colleagues first interviewed Ruthie in 2019, and after we published a story describing what she and her colleagues did, Amazon acknowledged the listening program. Technically, Alexa's terms of use gave Amazon wide latitude to do basically whatever it wanted with the recordings as long as the company was using that audio to improve the software. But many customers felt duped. They thought that when they spoke to their Alexa device, they were only dealing with clever software. And Bezos had gone back on his word. His precise promise to be transparent with how he used his customers data. It seemed that while he highly prioritized Amazon's corporate privacy, its secrecy, he was being careless with the privacy of his customers. And in 2018, Alexa had a huge privacy mishap. Here's my colleague Priya Anand, describing the infamous incident.
- [35:07]
Priya Anand
What happened? There is a family in Portland said that their echo randomly sent recorded conversations to a contact of theirs, a contact of the man in the houses. And what happened at the time was Amazon said this is how it worked. They said that Alexa interpreted something those people were saying in their background conversation as Alexa. So it woke up. Then it misunderstood a different phrase in their background conversation as send that message. It understood a different phrase in their background conversation. After that, the device asked to whom and thought that they responded with a name. So it ended up sending these conversations to one of their contacts through this crazy chain of events. It's like a horror movie.
- [35:51]
Greg Hart
After the couple's friend reached out to them and said, hey, I think your Alexa has been hacked. It turned out they weren't hacked. This was Alexa mishearing.
- [35:59]
Priya Anand
But at the end of the day, this kind of scenario where Alexa could misinterpret a series of things people were saying in their own home, interpret them as requests and send these people's recordings to someone else. If this kind of unlikely scenario can happen, and did happen, then who's to say it can't happen again? What else can Alexa mix up?
- [36:22]
Greg Hart
Even so, people were undeterred. Over the next few years, Amazon would sell tens of millions of Alexa devices and inspire imitators from Google and Apple. Its popularity cemented Bezos notion of himself as an inventor and the general public's perception of Amazon as an innovator. But Alexa hasn't quite met the goals its creators had for it. Most people only use it as a kitchen timer, a music player, a source for the occasional weather report. It's never been conversational in the way Bezos imagined. No one would call it the Star Trek computer, but that hasn't stopped consumers. An estimated 1 in 3 U.S. households currently have a smart speaker. In the years since Alexa launched launched, people have invited more items that integrate AI assistance into their homes. That includes stuff like Nest thermostats, ring cameras and Sonos speakers. Whenever a story about an Alexa privacy breach gets published, it makes a big splash. But it hardly ever changes anything because Alexa marked a turning point. It was another doorway into a more surveilled world and placed Amazon, alongside other big tech companies like Google and Facebook at the hot, controversial center of the battle over privacy. Finally, Alexa turned Amazon into a company its customers interacted with almost every single day, not just once a week or a few times a month when they wanted to buy something online. And there was another way Bezos would accomplish the same goal by producing his own TV shows and movies. Bezos risky expansion into Hollywood. That's next time on the Amazon Story. Foundering is hosted by me, Brad Stone, Sean Wen is our executive producer. Priya Anand and Matt Day contributed reporting to this episode. Ray Mondo is our audio engineer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Mark Millien, Ann Vanderme, Robin Agello and Molly Schutz are our story editors. Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends. See you next time.
- [38:46]
Brad Stone
Feeling buried in the never ending to do list that comes with running a business, managing orders, tracking expenses. It's a lot. That's where Amazon Business steps in. They've got smart buying solutions like Spend Visibility, a cloud based system to track your buying patterns so you can optimize your savings and bulk buying so you can continue to save costs on select products with quantity discounts smart, right? Let Amazon Business take care of the admin so you can focus on what really growing your business. Check out Smart business buying@amazonbusiness.com a business.
- [39:17]
Greg Hart
Prime membership is required to access Spend Visibility.
- [39:20]
Brad Stone
This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video phone or chat. Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations Hes Yu Jo discussing who can benefit from therapy I think a lot of people.
- [39:37]
Greg Hart
Think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point.
- [39:44]
Brad Stone
I think once you start even noticing.
- [39:46]
Greg Hart
That you feel a little bit off.
- [39:47]
Brad Stone
And you can't maintain this harmony that.
- [39:49]
Greg Hart
You once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody. There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from.
- [40:00]
Brad Stone
Improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. That's betterhelp.com.