Microsoft employees have been listening to Xbox audio since 2014

Employees of companies that partner with Microsoft have been listening to audio recorded by the Xbox through Kinect for years. Motherboard claims that based on interviews with such employees. That happened before the Xbox got Cortana support.

A majority of that audio was from children, according to Motherboard’s article. For example, they asked for certain Minecraft skin packs or to be able to download all games for free. Initially, there were also many audio fragments of people who did not want to give a voice command and were, for example, in the middle of a game.

Microsoft made it clear this month that people are listening to audio from its voice services to improve the software, but it did not become clear that this was already happening with Kinect. Also, there is a site to remove recorded audio. Listening to audio fragments has been happening since 2014.

Listening to excerpts to improve a voice assistant happens at all major companies: Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon and Assistant from Google. All companies have stopped letting people listen to recordings because of the fuss, at least temporarily. When listening to recordings, employees assess whether the voice assistant heard the person correctly and answered correctly. With that information, the companies want to improve the voice assistant. None of the companies made that clear in the terms and conditions.