Facebook also offers to pay some of its users for voice recordings in order to improve their speech recognition algorithms. According to the Company, snippets are used to teach smart speakers and camera systems used on apps such as its Facebook Portal.
Facebook has released its new market analysis app called ViewPoints last year after it has shut down its controversial VPN service. This application asks users to complete surveys and check a number of new items. Users earn reward points in return.
Three months after the launch of the application, Facebook has announced that it will pay some users for voice recordings as part of a new program called “Pronunciations” in its Viewpoints market research app. Only users who will qualify to be part of the program will be paid since the recordings are required to help improve the company’s speech recognition technology.
Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft found themselves in deep waters last year after they were caught listening to and transcribing voice recordings so that they could improve speech recognition. All this was done without informing people.
As far as the payment for the recording is concerned, it’s not much. The qualified people will get $5 for every 1000 points they make. For reference sake, you will have to record 20 voice clips saying ‘hey portal [and your friend’s name]’ and then you will get 200 reward points. All this for $1 seems pretty taxing.
Apart from this, Facebook claims that the recordings users provide will not be connected to their public Facebook profiles. Viewpoints and Facebook are two different apps that are not correlated.
