Google is still listening to Assistant audio, but with tweaked guidelines
After facing backlash for permitting human reviewers to listen in to Google Assistant conversations, the search engine announced today that it is resuming its practice, albeit with stricter guidelines.
Google noted in its blog that users can now choose to store their audio data through an opt-in Voice & Audio Activity (VAA) setting to help improve voice recognition, the official blog explains.
With the VAA enabled, human reviewers may listen to the audio recordings, however, the transcription process will be more secure with Assistant auto-deleting snippets recorded unintentionally.
Google Assistant will further delete audio data which is older than a few months associated with an account. Soon, there will be an option to adjust how sensitive the Google Assistant devices are to prompts like 'Hey Google' to prevent unintentional recording.
