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A24 TECHNOLOGY
Saturday 13 July 2019

In this Oct. 9, 2018, file photo a Google Home Hub is displayed
in New York.
Associated Press
Human workers can

listen to Google

In this June 19, 2017, file photo President Donald Trump, left, and Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Assistant recordings
Officer of Microsoft, center, listen as Jeff Bezos, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, speaks during
an American Technology Council roundtable in the State Dinning Room of the White House in BY RACHEL LERMAN
Washington.
Associated Press AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google contractors regularly lis-
Judge sides with Pentagon and ten to and review some recordings of what people say

Amazon in cloud bidding case to artificial-intelligence system Google Assistant, via their
phone or through smart speakers such as the Google

The company acknowledged that humans can access
By MATT O’BRIEN The Pentagon has said it Amazon. In an emailed Home.
AP Technology Writer wants to pick a vendor as statement earlier this week, those recordings after some of its Dutch language audio
A federal judge has dis- soon as Aug. 23. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an snippets were leaked. Google product manager David
missed allegations that bid- Formally called the Joint Iowa Republican, said the Monsees acknowledged the leak in a blog post Thursday,
ding for a $10 billion cloud Enterprise Defense Infra- Pentagon should start the and said the company is investigating the breach.
computing contract with structure plan, or JEDI, the bidding process over and “We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this
the Pentagon was rigged military’s computing proj- rewrite its proposal. space to prevent misconduct like this from happening
to favor Amazon. ect would store and pro- “The Defense Department again,” he wrote.
Friday’s ruling dismissing cess vast amounts of clas- should, at the very least, More than 1,000 recordings were obtained by Belgian
Oracle’s claims clears the sified data, allowing the hold off on awarding the broadcaster VRT NWS, which noted in a story that some
Defense Department to Pentagon to use artificial contract until the inspector contained sensitive personal conversations — as well as
award the contract to one intelligence to speed up its general has had a chance information that identified the person speaking. Google
of two finalists: Amazon or war planning and fighting to conduct a thorough in- says no user account information is associated with the
Microsoft. capabilities. vestigation and report on recordings, and reviewers are instructed not to transcribe
It will be a boon for which- Amazon was considered their findings,” Grassley background conversations.
ever company gets to run an early favorite when the said. But VRT reporters could hear spoken home addresses in
the 10-year computing Pentagon began detailing Along with conflict con- some of the recordings, and were able to track down the
project, which the U.S. mili- its cloud needs in 2017, but cerns, criticism of the proj- speakers. Some of these conversations were not directed
tary considers vital to main- rivals accused Amazon ex- ect has centered on the at Assistant and happened either as background noise
taining its technological ecutives and the Pentagon Pentagon’s decision to or as a mistaken recording when Assistant thought it was
advantage over adversar- of being overly cozy. award the entire 10-year being spoken to, but wasn’t.
ies and accelerating its use Oracle had its final chance contract to one vendor, Google says contractors listen to recordings to better un-
of artificial intelligence in to make its case against tasking a single private derstand language patterns and accents. Its user terms
warfare. Amazon — and the integri- company with storing and confirm recordings may be used by the company, stat-
Oracle and IBM were elimi- ty of the government’s bid- securing so much secret ing Assistant “records your voice and audio on Google
nated during an earlier ding process — in oral ar- data. services to improve speech recognition.”
round, but Oracle persist- guments Wednesday. The Murli Thirumale, CEO of Monsees wrote that Google works with contractors
ed with a legal challenge judge ruled two days later. cloud computing startup around the world to analyze the recordings.
claiming conflicts of inter- Oracle spokeswoman Deb- Portwox, said a decade is “These language experts review and transcribe a small
est. orah Hellinger didn’t ad- a “lifetime” in technology, set of queries to help us better understand those lan-
Court of Federal Claims dress the ruling in a state- and relying on one vendor guages,” he wrote.
Judge Eric Bruggink said ment Friday but said the for that long could limit in- Google’s terms don’t explicitly say that people review the
Friday that Oracle can’t company looks forward to novation. recordings, but do state that data could be analyzed as
demonstrate favoritism be- working with the Defense “To make a 10-year bet the company updates services or create new features.
cause it didn’t meet the Department and other is way too problematic,” The company acknowledged earlier this year that its re-
project’s bidding require- agencies in the future be- said Thirumale, who said his viewers listen to anonymous recordings in response to a
ments to begin with. Brug- cause Oracle’s cloud company is a sales partner Bloomberg report revealing that Amazon’s Alexa also
gink also sided with a Pen- products offer “significant with IBM, Amazon and Mi- uses contractors to listen to recordings. Amazon con-
tagon contracting officer’s performance and secu- crosoft but doesn’t have firmed the report.
earlier finding that there rity capabilities” over com- direct financial interests in Google’s recording feature can be turned off, but doing
were no “organizational petitors. Some members of the deal. so means Assistant loses some of its personalized touch.
conflicts of interest” and Congress have expressed “You may not have access People who turn off the recording feature lose the ability
no individual conflicts that concerns about reports of to the best and brightest for the Assistant to recognize individual voices and learn
harmed the bidding. potential favoritism toward technologies.”q your voice pattern.q