Speaker 1: Jeff Adams as a computer scientist. In two thousand and eleven,
Speaker 1: he was at a really tiny startup, just thirteen employees,
Speaker 1: called the App. They were working on technology that could
Speaker 1: transcribe voicemail into text messages. And then one day Jeff's
Speaker 1: fairy godmother showed up in the form of executives from Amazon.
Speaker 1: We went to a show and some people from Amazon
Speaker 1: came and talked to us, and they might be interested
Speaker 1: in possibly even acquiring us. And I thought, that's absurd.
Speaker 1: What could Amazon possibly be interested in speech for? Maybe
Speaker 1: they want you to be able to, you know, call
Speaker 1: up on the phone and order a book. Jeff figured
Speaker 1: the talks wouldn't amount too much, but over the course
Speaker 1: of the next few months they became serious. Naturally, he
Speaker 1: wanted to know why Amazon was interested. They said, you know,
Speaker 1: don't ask, it's our business. And I thought, well, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be my business too, and you might want to
Speaker 1: know whether whether we can do it um, But they wouldn't.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't say anything. They said, I'm sorry, were not
Speaker 1: at liberty to discuss any of this. There was one
Speaker 1: hint that Amazon would give, so one of the things
Speaker 1: they did let us know was that the guy who
Speaker 1: was kind of running this was Greg Hart, who we
Speaker 1: knew was the right hand person of Jeff Bezos. So
Speaker 1: they go to all the meetings with them. They are
Speaker 1: like the confidante, the consilior or whatever. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: we knew, okay, something this does have visibility at the
Speaker 1: highest levels, and Bezos must be behind it in in
Speaker 1: some form. As the deal was being finalized, Jeff's team
Speaker 1: traveled to Florence, Italy, to a computer speech conference along
Speaker 1: with several Amazon managers. They even stayed in a villa together,
Speaker 1: but the Amazon people didn't want to be seen with
Speaker 1: the voice transcription people during the conference. From day to
Speaker 1: day in the conference, we had to let we we
Speaker 1: I rented a van and we drove down into town
Speaker 1: and to the conference together. I had to let them
Speaker 1: out around the block, around the corner. It's like being
Speaker 1: a teenager and trying to hide the person you're dating
Speaker 1: from your parents. First of all, they didn't want anyone
Speaker 1: to know that they were from Amazon. They didn't want
Speaker 1: anyone to see them with us, so we had to
Speaker 1: avoid them at the conference. We would like, you know,
Speaker 1: look at each other and kind of smile from across
Speaker 1: the room or across the courtyard or whatever. But we
Speaker 1: couldn't sit together, we couldn't talk together, or whatever. That
Speaker 1: fall the deal was done. Amazon buys the speech company,
Speaker 1: and Jeff is still living in mystery. We had been
Speaker 1: employees of Amazon for like a week, but they had
Speaker 1: still not told us any anything. They said, no, we
Speaker 1: have to tell you in a closed room. So we
Speaker 1: all came out to Seattle. We all got in the
Speaker 1: room together. They closed the door, locked the door, put
Speaker 1: paper over the window in the door, closed the exterior windows. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was very secret, very mysterious, and hush, hush. Jeff
Speaker 1: and his team leaned forward. This was the moment they said,
Speaker 1: imagine something the size of a coke can that's sitting
Speaker 1: on your able and we're going to sell this for
Speaker 1: uh and people will be able to talk to it.
Speaker 1: And we thought, you know, we can't do this. The
Speaker 1: technology isn't there yet, it doesn't exist yet. And of
Speaker 1: course they did do it by inventing the technology, because
Speaker 1: the product they're talking about becomes Alexa, Amazon's AI virtual assistant,
Speaker 1: and that twenty co can is the Echo smart speaker.
Speaker 1: Though it ends up selling for more than twenty Alexa
Speaker 1: is one of Amazon's first forays into artificial intelligence, and
Speaker 1: it would bring Amazon into people's living rooms, further weaving
Speaker 1: it into their lives. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Brad Stone. In this episode, we're going to tell the
Speaker 1: story of the creation of Alexa. How Jeff Bezos almost
Speaker 1: singlehandedly conceived the idea for a voice activated computer and
Speaker 1: drove the device's creation. Alexa helped to solidify Amazon's image
Speaker 1: as an innovator and in the process challenge conventional notions
Speaker 1: of privacy. Will tell you more after a quick break.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, we talked about how Amazon survived
Speaker 1: the dot com bust, how Jeff Bezos said to colleagues,
Speaker 1: the only way out of this is to invent her
Speaker 1: way out. During those next few years, Bezos launched Amazon
Speaker 1: Prime and the Kindle. But there's another innovation from this era,
Speaker 1: one that generates huge profits for Amazon and sets the
Speaker 1: stage for the creation of its pioneering voice assistant. It's
Speaker 1: Amazon's cloud service called AWS, or Amazon Web Services. It's
Speaker 1: the most difficult of Bezos's inventions for lay people to understand,
Speaker 1: because as much as it may already seem like Amazon
Speaker 1: is everywhere a massive store, a network of warehouses, and
Speaker 1: the fleet of delivery people. There's one more way in
Speaker 1: which Amazon is ubiquitous indispensable. Amazon is literally holding up
Speaker 1: much of the Internet today. AWS is a highly profitable,
Speaker 1: fifty billion dollar annual business for Amazon. When you watch Netflix,
Speaker 1: you're often streaming video from Amazon. When you send a Snapchat,
Speaker 1: you're using Amazon servers. By two thousand and ten, Bezos
Speaker 1: was asking everyone in the company, what are you doing
Speaker 1: for AWS? You wanted Amazon to deepen and exploit the
Speaker 1: early lead it already had in running massive, cutting edge
Speaker 1: data centers. Around this time, he was at lunch with
Speaker 1: Greg Hart, the guy described as his consiliary, and the
Speaker 1: conversation turned how Google was starting to let people search
Speaker 1: just by talking into their smartphones. Here's Greg and and
Speaker 1: I said, look at how convenient is And I just
Speaker 1: did a Google voice search on pizza and your me um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's just so much faster than actually typing,
Speaker 1: you know, with your fingers or your thumbs pizza and
Speaker 1: your me on your phone waiting for results to come back. Now,
Speaker 1: Bezos has long been a believer in voice. Here he
Speaker 1: is all the way back in the year two thousand
Speaker 1: talking to Charlie Rose, I believe that for mobile commerce,
Speaker 1: the thing that's going to be the biggest part of
Speaker 1: that is voice, and I think there's a lot that
Speaker 1: can happen in the In the short term, it'll be
Speaker 1: kind of a stilted special purpose language for talking to
Speaker 1: Amazon dot Com. But in the long term it could
Speaker 1: even be natural language processing. I think that is a
Speaker 1: real mind bender. Now. A decade later, it seemed like
Speaker 1: this early prediction might come true. A few weeks after
Speaker 1: their fateful lunch, Bazo sent an email to Greg that read,
Speaker 1: we should build a twenty device with its brains in
Speaker 1: the cloud that's completely controlled by your voice. The central
Speaker 1: insight here was that the product could be inexpensive because
Speaker 1: it's brains resided in Amazon's data centers and could be
Speaker 1: constantly improved, So if you buy it, the product would
Speaker 1: be upgrading itself and you wouldn't even know it. A
Speaker 1: few weeks later, Greg started recruiting people inside the company
Speaker 1: for the project. He proceeded with total secrecy. The only
Speaker 1: thing he told colleagues was that it had the potential
Speaker 1: to be bigger than the Kindle, and at the time
Speaker 1: that seemed like laughable that that we could create something
Speaker 1: that could be bigger than Kindle, because Kindle, you know,
Speaker 1: at that time was now for years into its life,
Speaker 1: dominating the e reader and e ink market and was
Speaker 1: changing the way that people thought about meeting. Next, Greg
Speaker 1: acquired YAP, the speech recognition company where Jeff Adams worked.
Speaker 1: That team didn't think he knew what he was doing either.
Speaker 1: Amazon wanted people to be able to talk to a
Speaker 1: device across a room and haven't understand them. That's called
Speaker 1: far field speech recognition, and the technology for it didn't exist.
Speaker 1: Here's Jeff Adams again. The big problem is speech recognition
Speaker 1: at the time really relied on a close talking microphone.
Speaker 1: You needed to capture the speech close to the person's mouth.
Speaker 1: And they were talking about, Oh, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: in the garage and this thing is gonna coach me
Speaker 1: through changing my car's oil, and it's gonna be over
Speaker 1: on the other side of the garage, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be shouting things to it, and it's gonna be shouting
Speaker 1: instructions back or whatever. And we thought, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: There's there's too many reflective surfaces in the room. They're
Speaker 1: gonna mess up the audio. Basically, if you're shouting across
Speaker 1: the room, that introduces lots of echo and the computer
Speaker 1: gets confused. So I realized that this far field issue
Speaker 1: was going to be a problem. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: say anything in in front of the group. I didn't wanna,
Speaker 1: you know, um, appear unsupportive. But afterwards I tracked down
Speaker 1: Greg Hart in the hallway and I said, Greg, we're
Speaker 1: excited about this, but I think you should know that
Speaker 1: what you want to do, the technology isn't there yet.
Speaker 1: It doesn't exist yet. We don't we we don't have
Speaker 1: that technology to solve this far field speech problem. And
Speaker 1: he was unflapped. He said, uh, I appreciate that, thank
Speaker 1: you for telling me, But solve it. We are an Amazon,
Speaker 1: We've got resources, hire as many people as you need,
Speaker 1: to take as long as you want, but you know,
Speaker 1: solve the problem. The team gave itself the code name Doppler,
Speaker 1: as in the Doppler effect, which describes the way a
Speaker 1: sound wave moves with respect to a listener. They hotly
Speaker 1: debated everything from what to name the device, to what
Speaker 1: it should do, to how to market that to the public.
Speaker 1: At first, they met with Bezos once a month. He
Speaker 1: would get deeply involved in the technology. UM, not just
Speaker 1: the business or the product, but deeply involved in the technology.
Speaker 1: He I would say, he stayed very close to the
Speaker 1: project throughout. As a project progressed, those meetings would increase
Speaker 1: in frequency UM and UH. And by the end we
Speaker 1: were meeting with him, you know, leading up to launch,
Speaker 1: I would say, there probably wasn't a day that went
Speaker 1: by that we didn't have at least one meeting with
Speaker 1: Jeff UM. And you know, sometimes there were multiple meetings
Speaker 1: with Jeff in a single day. UM. That is both
Speaker 1: a blessing and a curse. The blessing came in the
Speaker 1: form of money. The team could spend whatever they needed
Speaker 1: to break through the technical obstacles. This is a big
Speaker 1: project that Jeff is personally invested in. It was his
Speaker 1: idea originally. He can be very demanding. UM, he can
Speaker 1: push teams UM. But at the same time, like being
Speaker 1: able to go through that experience and have his brain
Speaker 1: on your side is an immensely powerful opportunity and experience
Speaker 1: if you let it, like if you get really frustrated
Speaker 1: by it. And at times some of the people on
Speaker 1: my product team would say, it feels like Jeff is
Speaker 1: the product manager for Alexa. Bezo set the vision for Alexa.
Speaker 1: He wanted it to be the Star Trek computer. He
Speaker 1: pictured a versatile, conversational machine that could respond to any question.
Speaker 1: You should be able to sit in your living room
Speaker 1: and ask Alexa anything. It sounds simple, but it's not
Speaker 1: because they needed a lot of data to train the
Speaker 1: AI algorithms. For example, for Alexa to tell you the weather,
Speaker 1: they would have to understand the phrasing of your question
Speaker 1: and your dialect from across a noisy room, and sort
Speaker 1: through databases for the right answer. This would take Alexa
Speaker 1: a step further than Syrior Google Voice, which only worked
Speaker 1: when you spoke directly into your phone. But the Alexa
Speaker 1: team just didn't have the data to get the AI smart.
Speaker 1: The early prototypes worked so badly that even Amazon employees
Speaker 1: didn't really want to test them. Bassos was getting impatient.
Speaker 1: He actually walked out of a number of internal meetings
Speaker 1: and frustration. Then Greg and his colleague struck upon an
Speaker 1: idea they called Project Amped. Basically, rents houses or apartments
Speaker 1: in cities all over the US, and we would put
Speaker 1: devices in those apartments. They were all camouflaged, and they
Speaker 1: were not just Amazon devices. There were other companies devices
Speaker 1: there as well, UM, some of which were visible, some
Speaker 1: of which were not visible. And characteristic of all Amazon projects,
Speaker 1: secrecy was the priority. Employees were careful to conceal Amazon's
Speaker 1: identity when they set up the room, and that was
Speaker 1: all about obfuscation, you know, we didn't want people to
Speaker 1: understand what company we were working for. UM, and so
Speaker 1: you could see an xbox, you could see this, you
Speaker 1: could see that UM. And then we would have all
Speaker 1: these Alexa devices hidden throughout the room or echo devices,
Speaker 1: prototype devices, and then they brought in testers, thousands of
Speaker 1: people paid an hourly wage, coming in at all hours
Speaker 1: of the day and days of the week to train
Speaker 1: the machines. Then we would bring in we would recruit participants,
Speaker 1: have people with different accents, you know, male, female, different
Speaker 1: ages who would come in and we would ask them
Speaker 1: to do a mixture of reading scripted things and then
Speaker 1: also talking in a much more off the cuff all
Speaker 1: the cart fashion to ask for things that people would
Speaker 1: be we hoped asking Alexa when we launched. Amazon conducted
Speaker 1: the data gathering effort with such stealth that neighbors started
Speaker 1: to get suspicious. House that we rented in Boston that
Speaker 1: the neighbors thought that because we had a lot of
Speaker 1: cars showing up and individuals getting out on their own
Speaker 1: and coming in and spending I think maybe an hour,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot of sort of you know,
Speaker 1: transient in and out traffic, and neighbors thought that maybe
Speaker 1: there was you know, a drug running ring or something
Speaker 1: else going on, and so the police actually showed up
Speaker 1: despite the attention from police. Bezos loved the inventiveness of
Speaker 1: the data gathering program. When we first took AMPED to him,
Speaker 1: his response was effectively like, now you're talking, like let's
Speaker 1: do this, um, Like tell me if you want more money,
Speaker 1: Greg says. The project AMPED ran in thirteen cities and
Speaker 1: included over ten people. The devices were placed all over
Speaker 1: the room, and so we were trying to capture a
Speaker 1: massive amount of acoustic data about, you know, how noise
Speaker 1: performs in a room in all kinds of different rooms,
Speaker 1: in bedrooms and living rooms, in kitchens, in bathrooms. The
Speaker 1: result Amazon basically solved the far field voice problem. It
Speaker 1: took six months for this company to solve a problem
Speaker 1: that had stumped speech scientists for decades. But since the
Speaker 1: project was top secret, they weren't able to tell anyone,
Speaker 1: not even the speech science community, about their big technological breakthrough.
Speaker 1: Here's Ahmed Boozid. He had been working in voice technology
Speaker 1: for almost twenty years when Amazon tried to recruit him
Speaker 1: in early two fifteen. I turned him down. I said,
Speaker 1: you're not showing me anything. You have never done anything
Speaker 1: in voice, and you're telling me that you are going
Speaker 1: to any uly to to go from DC and go
Speaker 1: to Seattle and they'll let you. Just trust us. I know, no,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I mean, I've seen the Kindle
Speaker 1: and it's fine, it's okay, but Kindall is like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a toy compared to what you guys are trying
Speaker 1: to do. So anyway, I said no twice. Eventually they
Speaker 1: flew Ahmed out to Amazon headquarters to see Alexa in person.
Speaker 1: So it was, you know, on the table, and so
Speaker 1: the first thing I did is I asked it for
Speaker 1: for music, and he plays some Miles Davis and it
Speaker 1: did I'm like, okay, cool, And then I suppos I said,
Speaker 1: you know what time is it? Man stopping and told
Speaker 1: me the time, and then it continued playing Miles datas,
Speaker 1: which was great. Interacting with Alexa was almost a moving
Speaker 1: moment for Ahmed. He felt like decades of scientific research
Speaker 1: had been realized in this little device, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, this is amazing, This is amazing.
Speaker 1: This is clearly an important moment in technology. And this
Speaker 1: is what I've been doing all my life, right, solving
Speaker 1: the problem problems. See, you know, we people who are
Speaker 1: in the speech were are always saying this expression, you know,
Speaker 1: speeches around the corner. We've been saying it's since the
Speaker 1: mid nineties, species around the corner, because we do believe
Speaker 1: that if you do speech well, a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: becomes easy to do for people. Ahmed was particularly impressed
Speaker 1: by two innovations that Amazon made. One that they solved
Speaker 1: the far field speech issue and secondly a let so
Speaker 1: it was fast to speed right. The fact that it's
Speaker 1: just I was, I was just amazed, Like, how the
Speaker 1: hell does come back within within like two seconds? I mean,
Speaker 1: if I if I type, you know, if I want
Speaker 1: to launch a page on my browser, or it takes
Speaker 1: like sometimes like three four or five seconds. Right, How
Speaker 1: is how the hell is this thing doing all of
Speaker 1: these things, getting my voice going to the cloud, processing it,
Speaker 1: coming back talking back within two seconds. It's like a
Speaker 1: magic even for someone like me who was been like
Speaker 1: you should be jaded by by by then, Right, okay,
Speaker 1: I know exactly how it's happened. I was astonished. Right,
Speaker 1: how the hell did they do that? We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I want to take a moment to address Amazon's obsessive secrecy.
Speaker 1: Many companies are secretive, but tech companies today have the
Speaker 1: eyes of the world on them, so they are taking
Speaker 1: corporate secrecy to a whole other level. Like that story.
Speaker 1: Jeff Adams, the speech scientist, told that the Amazon executives
Speaker 1: were so secretive when the acquired a company that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't even be seen together at a conference. That's typical
Speaker 1: of Amazon. This intense drive for secrecy comes straight from
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos. He wants to tightly control the messaging around
Speaker 1: Amazon's new products. The idea is that complete secrecy pays
Speaker 1: off with a surprising, almost magical reveal once the product
Speaker 1: is launched. That man keeping Alexa under wraps until launch,
Speaker 1: preserving the details of how it actually worked, and choosing
Speaker 1: the perfect voice here's Greg Hart, how do you define
Speaker 1: the characteristics that you want the voice to have? And
Speaker 1: so there was sort of a brief that we wrote
Speaker 1: up about the qualities you wanted the person to be knowledgeable.
Speaker 1: We very quickly early on, decided the first voice would
Speaker 1: be female. We knew there would be additional voices, but
Speaker 1: we felt that the first voice should be female in
Speaker 1: because yeah, so that's the logical question why In part
Speaker 1: because the we knew that the device would be in
Speaker 1: the kitchen, and we felt that a female voice would
Speaker 1: be more open and inviting and warm than a male
Speaker 1: voice would be in that environment, and more appropriate in
Speaker 1: that environment. Not because of any sexist things, but just
Speaker 1: because of the fact that we knew, um that we
Speaker 1: knew the way that, um, that's the right way to
Speaker 1: say this. We had seen evidence that people respond differently
Speaker 1: to male computer voices than to female computer voices, and
Speaker 1: they respond more positively to female computer voices, and we
Speaker 1: wanted because the device was in the home, we wanted
Speaker 1: it to be a device that everybody would respond positively to.
Speaker 1: Putting a female voice in the kitchen, so to speak,
Speaker 1: would turn out to be a somewhat controversial choice, and
Speaker 1: Amazon isn't the only company to do this. Serie. Google
Speaker 1: Voice and Microsoft Cortana are all women by default, So
Speaker 1: Amazon moved forward in their search for a voice. They
Speaker 1: contracted with the same studio that had developed the voice
Speaker 1: of Sirie for Apple. Okay, I set up your meeting
Speaker 1: with David tomorrow. Shall I schedule it? Who is voiced
Speaker 1: by Susan Bennett, a career voice actress. Hi, my name
Speaker 1: is Susan Bennett, and I have a voice actor and
Speaker 1: the original voice of Sirie. So to find their Alexa,
Speaker 1: the studio had half a dozen female voice actresses read
Speaker 1: for hours. They read entire books and random articles, and
Speaker 1: finally Greg Hart and Jeff Bezos picked one woman. Her
Speaker 1: identity hasn't been revealed in all this time. It's amazing
Speaker 1: to me as an Amazon reporter that Amazon has still
Speaker 1: been able to keep the voice of Alexa a secret.
Speaker 1: In I started canvassing voice over actors, asking if they
Speaker 1: knew the identity of Alexa. No one knew. Finally, I
Speaker 1: got a tip from someone who had worked with the
Speaker 1: studio that Amazon contracted with, and they said that Alexa
Speaker 1: was voiced by an actress and singer from Boulder, Colorado
Speaker 1: named Nina Raleigh reached out to Raleigh numerous times, she
Speaker 1: wouldn't confirm that she's the voice of Alexa, but she
Speaker 1: didn't deny it either. Eventually I confirmed with enough people
Speaker 1: that I feel confident she's the one. She's Alexa. Here's
Speaker 1: a clip from her website and add that she did
Speaker 1: for Time Warner Cable. Thanks for choosing Time Warner. Now
Speaker 1: that you've ordered your installation, let's set up a time
Speaker 1: to get a crew over to your place. And here's Alexa.
Speaker 1: Time Warner Cable, also simply known as Time Warner, was
Speaker 1: an American cable television company. It was ranked the second
Speaker 1: largest cable company in the United States. But imagine what
Speaker 1: it might be like to be Nina Raleigh. Your voice
Speaker 1: is piped into millions of homes every day, each new
Speaker 1: iteration of Alexa, each update for Amazon, you have to
Speaker 1: record something new, Like when Amazon Fresh released a product
Speaker 1: called the single Burger. She had to be available single
Speaker 1: Cow Burger, a beef burger made with meat from just
Speaker 1: a single cow. She's chained to Alexa. It sounds like
Speaker 1: a life of obscurity and loneliness. Compare that to Siri
Speaker 1: and Susan Bennett. She's spoken on CNN and countless talk shows.
Speaker 1: She's even been able to use her fame as the
Speaker 1: voice of Sirie as leverage for many more opportunities. Greg
Speaker 1: saw the burden that Amazon secrecy put on the human
Speaker 1: behind the voice of Alexa. I never met her um
Speaker 1: and I don't even know that I might have. I'm
Speaker 1: not have spoken with her once, but I never met her.
Speaker 1: And it would be interesting to be in her shoes now,
Speaker 1: because it's on the one hand, it's it's incredible that
Speaker 1: this thing that you contributed to is now so ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, I would think it would be,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe a little bit unsettling. Amazon introduced the
Speaker 1: Echo in November two, fourteen were re strived from Amazon.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what it was. With a YouTube video,
Speaker 1: Alexa play rock music, rock music, alexis stop. We want
Speaker 1: to try Alexa, what time is it? The time is three.
Speaker 1: You actually don't have to yell at it. Okay. It
Speaker 1: uses far Fueld technology so it can hear you from
Speaker 1: anywhere in the room, So I can just hear you anywhere. Yes,
Speaker 1: that promise was enough. A responsive computer that can tell
Speaker 1: the time or the weather, play music, and answer questions
Speaker 1: from across the room. Tens of thousands of people joined
Speaker 1: a waiting list to receive a device. Here's Bezos at
Speaker 1: the Recode Technology conference in two thousand sixteen saying that
Speaker 1: the future is Alexa. He's speaking to Walt Mossburg. But
Speaker 1: it has been a dream ever since, you know, people started,
Speaker 1: you know, in the early days of science fiction to
Speaker 1: have a computer that you can talk to. So are
Speaker 1: you deeply committed to this becoming a huge part of
Speaker 1: your business and what you Absolutely We've been working on it.
Speaker 1: You know, we worked on it. We have more than
Speaker 1: a thousand people dedicated us to Alexa in the Echo ecosystem,
Speaker 1: and it's a and there's so much more to come.
Speaker 1: Baz also is deploying his playbook. For experiments that produced
Speaker 1: promising sparks, he poured gasoline on them. Amazon ramped up
Speaker 1: hiring the Alexa team, balloon to ten thou employees, and
Speaker 1: Bezos paider on ten million dollars for the company's first
Speaker 1: ever Super Bowl at starring Alec Baldwin and Missy Elliott.
Speaker 1: Alex to stop. How you do that? It's my Amazon
Speaker 1: Echo like extreme music, order things and watch this. I
Speaker 1: like to turn on the lights. Wow. Inside the company,
Speaker 1: employee has noticed that he seemed to take real joy
Speaker 1: in the work here's Ahmed Jeff, you know, the CEO
Speaker 1: and the guy in charge, uh was I would say
Speaker 1: he was obsessed with Alexa. How many he had this
Speaker 1: saying that I am happiest. He used to say this,
Speaker 1: I'm happy is when I'm working on Alexa UM and
Speaker 1: so he you know, it was his favorite time of
Speaker 1: the day. Used to meet with ALEX a team and
Speaker 1: work and work on ALEX. So he was directly involved
Speaker 1: in the early days. Basis was frequently asked about privacy.
Speaker 1: At the two thousand sixteen Code Conference, he promised to
Speaker 1: be a good steward of the sensitive personal data that
Speaker 1: Alexa was sure to pick up. This is going to
Speaker 1: get much deeper into our lives. So so what are
Speaker 1: what are the privacy I think that if you take
Speaker 1: the totality of you know, privacy UM and our ability
Speaker 1: to store large amounts of information to use it in
Speaker 1: ways that customers actually do want us to use it.
Speaker 1: So there are benefits. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that you have to do is when you collect
Speaker 1: and store data, you have to be clear about what
Speaker 1: you're doing. You have to and not just you know,
Speaker 1: subsection seventeen, paragraph three clearly as you can see at
Speaker 1: our privacy policy we were allowed to do that. Would
Speaker 1: you have to figure out ways to be kind of
Speaker 1: obviously clear? He stood on stage and promised that the
Speaker 1: privacy policy would be obviously clear. What he wasn't saying
Speaker 1: was that Alexa was so smart in part because there
Speaker 1: were real life humans listening through the machines, helping to
Speaker 1: craft many of Alexa's answers and to fix its errors
Speaker 1: by listening to what a subset of users said. The
Speaker 1: company kept Alexa owners in the dark about how this
Speaker 1: aspect of their devices worked. Ruthie Hope Slattess was one
Speaker 1: of those people being paid to listen. Several years ago,
Speaker 1: she saw an ad from a temp agency seeking someone
Speaker 1: with an English or journalism degree. They offered twelve dollars
Speaker 1: an hour to transcribe audio recordings. There was a kind
Speaker 1: of a generic add on prex list. I don't think
Speaker 1: it mentioned Amazon at all. She applied, She passed US
Speaker 1: curity check and a grammar test, and then she was
Speaker 1: let in on her task. She would listen to conversations
Speaker 1: picked up by the echoes microphones and type them up
Speaker 1: and then feed the information back in the Amazon system.
Speaker 1: She said it seemed like a good job. At first,
Speaker 1: we heard the customer using it in you know, ordering
Speaker 1: flour and asking what time it was and asking to
Speaker 1: be told to joke and so forth, and it seemed
Speaker 1: pretty cool. I mean a little invasive, for sure, but
Speaker 1: but pretty cool overall. Ruthie was there to make Alexa's
Speaker 1: responses seem more nuanced, more intuitive, more human. This was
Speaker 1: right around the time Amazon started selling the Echo to
Speaker 1: customers on a limited basis. She assumed at first that
Speaker 1: the folks she was listening to had signed up to
Speaker 1: help improve Amazon speech recognition software, and knew that someone
Speaker 1: might be listening. Who were all of these all of
Speaker 1: these many many voices and people were they? Various people
Speaker 1: work for Amazon who agreed to bring this home where
Speaker 1: they you know? But then if they were, would they
Speaker 1: really be ordering sex toys, you know, um and talking
Speaker 1: dirty to it and all of the grotesque things that
Speaker 1: we occasionally heard. Almost immediately, it was clear to Ruthie
Speaker 1: that people liked a toy with Alexa in ways that
Speaker 1: Amazon maybe didn't intend. What can we ask her? How
Speaker 1: how will she respond if we abuse her, if we
Speaker 1: talked dirty to her, if we asked her to marry us?
Speaker 1: If we you know, that sort of thing. Most of
Speaker 1: the sexual stuff seemed innocuous enough. Percent of it wasn't disturbing.
Speaker 1: You know, it was sometimes humorous and sometimes you know,
Speaker 1: kind of silly or weird or entertaining even you know,
Speaker 1: like somebody trying to figure out what kind of dildo
Speaker 1: toward her or something like that, you know, but sometimes
Speaker 1: it did get disturbing if it was a man who
Speaker 1: was talking to her, like he would talk in an
Speaker 1: abusive way to a woman, Like you could hear it
Speaker 1: in his voice, And she wondered if men were being
Speaker 1: so rude in part because Alexa was female, and being
Speaker 1: a woman, even an ai woman, meant that Alexa would
Speaker 1: be on the receiving end of misogyny. Even children did this.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of kids who would talk abusively
Speaker 1: to her, and it felt as though they were exercising
Speaker 1: some sort of anger that they had towards their parents
Speaker 1: or their teacher or something like that. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of psychology that I thought was fascinating. Ruthie felt
Speaker 1: like the way people spoke to Alexa was so private,
Speaker 1: so intimate. They would never ever speak like this if
Speaker 1: they knew someone was listening. There in their private home.
Speaker 1: They think that no one will ever hear the words
Speaker 1: that are coming out of their mouth. Ever, they do
Speaker 1: know that they're talking to a robot, but at the
Speaker 1: same time they're speaking to a row that as those
Speaker 1: essentient being. Ruthie's job was a secret. It wouldn't become
Speaker 1: public until years later that people like her were helping
Speaker 1: to improve the software by analyzing real Alexa recordings. My
Speaker 1: colleagues first interviewed Ruthie in two thousand nineteen, and after
Speaker 1: we published a story describing what she and her colleagues did,
Speaker 1: Amazon acknowledged the listening program. Technically, Alexa's terms of use
Speaker 1: gave Amazon wide latitude to duke basically whatever it wanted
Speaker 1: with the recordings, as long as the company was using
Speaker 1: that audio to improve the software. But many customers fell duped.
Speaker 1: They thought that when they spoke to their Alexa device,
Speaker 1: they were only dealing with clever software, and Bezos had
Speaker 1: gone back on his word his precise promise to be
Speaker 1: transparent with how he used as customers data. It seemed
Speaker 1: that while he highly prioritized Amazon's corporate privacy it's secrecy,
Speaker 1: he was being careless with the privacy of his customers,
Speaker 1: and in two thousand eight teen, Alexa had a huge
Speaker 1: privacy mishap. Here's my colleague Prea and Nod describing the
Speaker 1: infamous incident. What happened there is a family in Portland's
Speaker 1: said that their echo randomly sent recorded conversations to a
Speaker 1: contact of their's, a contact of the man in the houses.
Speaker 1: And what happened at the time was Amazon said this
Speaker 1: is how it worked. They said that Alexa interpreted something
Speaker 1: those people were saying in their background conversation as Alexa,
Speaker 1: so it woke up. Then it misunderstood a different phrase
Speaker 1: in their background conversation as send that message. It understood
Speaker 1: a different phrase in their background conversation. After that, the
Speaker 1: device asked to whom and thought that they responded with
Speaker 1: a name, So it ended up sending these conversations to
Speaker 1: one of their contacts through this crazy chain of events.
Speaker 1: It's like a horror movie. After the couple's friend reached
Speaker 1: out to them and said, hey, I think you're Alexa
Speaker 1: has been hacked, it turned out they weren't hacked. This
Speaker 1: was Alexa mishearing. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: this kind of scenario where Alexa could misinterpret a series
Speaker 1: of things people were saying in their own home, interpret
Speaker 1: them as requests, and send these people's recordings to someone else.
Speaker 1: If this kind of unlikely scenario can happen, and did happen,
Speaker 1: then who's to say it can't happen again? What else
Speaker 1: can Alexa mix up? Even so, people were undeterred. Over
Speaker 1: the next few years, Amazon would sell tens of millions
Speaker 1: of Alexa devices and inspire imitators from Google and Apple.
Speaker 1: It's popularity cemented bezos notion of himself as an inventor
Speaker 1: and the general public's perception of Amazon as an innovator.
Speaker 1: But Alexa hasn't quite met the goals its creators had
Speaker 1: for it. Most people only use it as a kitchen timer,
Speaker 1: a music player, a source for the occasional weather report.
Speaker 1: It's never been conversational in the way Bezos imagined no
Speaker 1: one would call at the Star Trek computer, but that
Speaker 1: hasn't stopped consumers and estimated one in three US households
Speaker 1: currently have a smart speaker. In the years since Alexa launched,
Speaker 1: people have invited more items that integrate AI assistance into
Speaker 1: their homes. That includes stuff like nest thermostats, ring cameras,
Speaker 1: and Sono speakers. Whenever a story about an Alexa privacy
Speaker 1: breach gets published, it makes a big splash, but it
Speaker 1: hardly ever changes anything. Because Alexa marked a turning point,
Speaker 1: It was another doorway into a more surveiled world and
Speaker 1: placed Amazon alongside other big tech companies like Google and
Speaker 1: Facebook at the hot controversial center of the battle over privacy. Finally,
Speaker 1: Alexa turned to Amazon into a company its customers interacted
Speaker 1: with almost every single day, not just once a week
Speaker 1: or a few times a month when they wanted to
Speaker 1: buy something online. And there was another way Bezos would
Speaker 1: accomplish the same goal by producing his own TV shows
Speaker 1: and movies. Bezos is risky expansion into hollyw would that's
Speaker 1: next time on Foundering The Amazon story. Foundering is hosted
Speaker 1: by me brad Stone. Sean wen Is. Our executive producer.
Speaker 1: Pria Nad and Matt Day contributed reporting to this episode.
Speaker 1: Raymondo is our audio engineer, Molly Nugent as our associate producer,
Speaker 1: Mark Million and Manner May Robin a Jello and Molly
Speaker 1: shoots our story editors. Francesca Levi is the head of
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and if you like
Speaker 1: our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends
Speaker 1: see you next time.