Both intended and not intended commands.
Chances are, If you have a Kinect hooked up to your Xbox, Microsoft has probably heard you (or more likely, someone in your house) give it accidental commands. Mostly due to the fact that, according to contractors that worked for Microsoft, it was sort of their job to do so.
“Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did,” one former contractor who worked on behalf of Microsoft told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources in this story anonymity as they had signed non-disclosure agreements.
Essentially, this was done to improve the service. And while most of the audio were direct commands, like “Xbox on” or “Hey Cortana”, some were clearly accidental. And a lot of those were actually children. And it was all fairly benign, at least compared to what these same sorts of contractors said about doing the same for Skype and Cortana on other platforms.
Notably, this did improve the service; there were fewer accidental activations as time went on. The contractors all seemed to start from 2014 onward to 2015; in 2016, Cortana proper was added to the Xbox One. As they describe it, though, the Xbox stuff was far less unpleasant than the recordings from other Microsoft services.
“The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands,” they added. “‘Xbox give me all the games for free’ or ‘Xbox download [newest Minecraft skins pack]’ or whatever,” they added. The former contractor was paid $10 an hour for their work, according to an employment document shared with Motherboard.
“Occasionally I heard ‘Xbox, tell Solas to heal,’ or something similar, which would be a command for Dragon Age: Inquisition,” the former contractor said, referring to hearing audio of in-game commands.
Before you get super upset, however, they didn’t have any user-identifiable data. Everything was kept anonymized; according to Microsoft themselves, the data is only accessible through a secure online portal and has identifying information removed. That said, they do have work-from-home positions for these kinds of contractors.
The contractor said, “I generally feel like that while we do not have access to user identifiable information, that if Microsoft users were aware that random people sitting at home in their pajamas who could be joking online with friends about the stuff they just heard that they wouldn’t like that.”
Source: Gamesindustry
About Author
