Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the
size of a ladybug and be able to randomly spy on people’s lives? Working as an
automatic speech recognition transcriber is as close I got to such an
experience. Except that the window I had into people’s lives was no more than
15 seconds long, and I did not have to move out of my chair to actually fly
into their homes. But close enough.
I am bilingual in French and English, and moved to the U.S.
a year ago. I needed an easy and flexible job while still transitioning lives
and finding my feet here. I saw an ad to become a transcriber for an automatic
speech recognition device, passed several tests, and started working.
I thought this would be a pretty inoffensive job, but I did
not expect some of the things I would come across. Some of them pretty boring,
some of them downright shocking, and some others saddening. Here’s a glimpse into
the 5 main issues one may face when doing that kind of work.
1) Creepy porn requests.
Porn requests are not really shocking of a finding, are
they? Still, it is a little disturbing to hear things people don’t really
expect to be heard. And what is more disturbing is when you hear requests for
rape scenarios or borderline child porn. That can stick with
you for a few hours after hearing it, believe me.
2) Loneliness in the 21st century
Men requesting escorts or cam girls are not that
weird — that kind of practice has existed since the dawn of time. Yet, it goes
a step further when people directly ask to “chat” with the speech recognition
device itself. One audio will stick with me forever: it started with TV in the
background, and then a weak, half-asleep voice addressed his device and said
“Hey, let’s chat.” The lonely tone of his voice made me shiver — or at least,
what I perceived to be loneliness in his voice. Like when I hear about some
people being in love with their sex dolls and things like that: when people
have to resort to non-living things imitating living things in
order to feel like they have a connection to the world. Indeed, the movie
“Her” depicting how a lonely writer develops a close relationship with
his talking operating system is not too far-fetched.
3) Sexism in the industry of
speech-recognition devices…
Between Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, the two most
popular ones (but many other “female” ones exist), how come both have a
female-sounding name? Why do these “assistants”, made to serve the
device’s owner, still mainly have female voices? Whether it is intentional or
just so ingrained in the mentality –women are good at assisting, right–
the outcome is just wrong. To go further, here is a good article in The Atlantic explaining how it is
indeed based on sexist biases - see also this Time article going in more detail on that, and on
the Cortana controversy. Indeed, if you want to learn a bit more about where
she comes from, she is originally a character from the video game Halo, where
she supports the Master Chief directly - and of course, in order to
provide "tactical advice, instant-access information, and calculations
that far exceed the capabilities of even a super-human Spartan soldier,"
she had to be naked to be able to do her job duties, right?
4) … and how that sexism is directly linked
to everyday sexism
Indeed, take a female voice who “does your commands” and a
dumb teenager or disgruntled adult man, and you will get many requests like
“Hey, suck my d**k”, “Do you want to sleep with me?”, or simply “Shut up you
stupid b***h”, and so on. And while it is “only an electronic device”, this
kind of comments still says loads on how women are perceived in our society, in
my view. Having more male-sounding talking devices could be a little help in
shifting the general mindset.
5) The kind of “privacy” we have
Yes, I have heard several creepy pornographic requests, some
of which made me sick deep in my guts. Yet one cannot help but wonder how come
such private commands, which were clearly not made to be heard by another human
being, came to fall into my ears. Either the device’s owner does not care, in
which case that’s fine; either they actually don’t know, or realize, that their
audio commands will be kept in a database and heard by another human being like
me, who will need to transcribe these things word for word.
Another important point is that, with the company I work
with, a button exists to report content — on grounds of criminal content, for
instance. Here again, it is disturbing to know that somehow, the audio can
still be traced back to the physical person in question, even though it is
supposed to be anonymous. But don’t you worry, Big Brother is watching you.
This is a slightly edited version of the article that was first posted on the Medium channel "Becoming Human," which explores artificial intelligence and what it means to be human.
