provide you with recommendations based on your requests. For example, Alexa may
recommend Alexa skills you might like based on the Alexa skills you use.
How do my voice recordings and text transcripts improve Alexa?
Alexa is designed to get smarter every day. For example, we use your requests to Alexa to
train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems using machine
learning. Training Alexa with real world requests from a diverse range of customers is
necessary for Alexa to respond properly to the variation in our customers’ speech patterns,
dialects, accents, and vocabulary and the acoustic environments where customers use
Alexa.
This training relies in part on supervised machine learning, an industry-standard practice
where humans review an extremely small sample of requests to help Alexa understand the
correct interpretation of a request and provide the appropriate response in the future. For
example, a human reviewing a customer’s request for the weather in Austin can identify that
Alexa misinterpreted it as a request for the weather in Boston. Our supervised learning
process includes multiple safeguards to protect customer privacy. You can manage the use
of your voice recordings to improve our services and develop new features by
visiting
Settings > Alexa Privacy > Manage your Alexa data
in the Alexa app.
How do Alexa skills work?
Skills are voice-driven Alexa capabilities. You can view and enable skills in your Alexa app
and enable certain skills by voice. You can use a skill by saying a specific phrase, called the
invocation name. When you use a skill, we may exchange related information with the
developer of that skill, such as your answers when you play a trivia skill, your ZIP code when
you ask for the weather, or the content of your requests (but not your voice recordings). If
you make a request to Alexa without using a skill invocation name, we may send the content
of your request to several skills, and enable and launch the skill we think is best able to
respond to your request.
The Skills portion of your Alexa app contains more information about skills, such as privacy
policies and terms provided by skill developers. By default, we do not share your personal
information with skill developers. You can choose to grant us permission to share additional
information with a skill developer (such as your name and email address with a restaurant
booking skill to make a reservation). You can see and manage the skills that you granted
permission to access specific additional information through
Settings
>
Alexa Privacy
in the
https://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings