Why would ordinary people assume that this testing is done on live customer data? I understand that this is a common practice in the industry, it's not the only way to do the testing, and I'd bet it would surprise most people.

I would think most people would think that they write software that can understand human speech, the same way they write software that can make a web page.

For the people that do realize it needs to be trained, most of them probably think that it's trained using internal data. Data created at Google or such.

Only people that really understand ML are likely to realize they need the scale of data only their customers can provide to do a really good job (_if_ they even do need that).

That is fundamentally incorrect.

My 74 years old father in law uses Google Assistant and Google Home way more than I do; they are a brilliant way for him to interact with technology.

He has absolutely no inkling that any of that leaves the little gray device in his kitchen, let alone any "Cloud" thing in the background, let alone that anybody is listening to it.

He would be genuinely, completely surprised, and is likely to be very uncomfortable, to be presented with any of these facts.

I will venture that he's more representative of an average user than you or I; as techies, we must consciously remind ourselves that most people are not techies, otherwise our view of society will be skewed in the extreme. :-/

I don't buy that. If Google trains models with humans then that should be transparent. Data collection sorely needs policies to cover transparency of processing and disclose all of the forms in a very straightforward manner.

But is it also natural to assume that this is done without explicit consent? With telemetry data for applications you can usually disable this kind of inspection of your data.

> No one* that gives it more than a passing thought

*who has an understanding of ML

the adjacent question is, are humans watching Google Nest cameras to train ML models ? the answer is not so clear