Mr. Ryan Meade:

Thank you Chairman for the opportunity to contribute to the committee's deliberations on voice assisted technologies. I work with Google in Ireland as government affairs and public policy manager. I am joined by my colleague, William Malcolm, who is a director in Google's privacy legal team. We are very pleased to contribute to the meeting today and share some information on the Google Assistant product. Launched in 2016, Google Assistant is designed to be a conversational experience across devices that helps users get things done. Users talk to it to get results. They can ask for information, schedule events and alarms, make reservations, or issue commands to control a device such as a smart light or music player. The assistant responds with the most suitable answer or action. The ability to interact with technology through a simple conversation is helping more users enjoy the benefits of online access. Users speak in their natural language when talking to the assistant. By the end of this year, the assistant will be available in 32 languages in 83 countries, including the ability to handle a wide array of accents.

Advances in speech recognition are benefiting many users for whom typing is a challenge: users with dexterity issues, including people with physical disabilities and older adults, but also users who struggle with literacy or who speak languages where alphabetisation is an issue. In this sense, the Google Assistant represents the next stage in realising Google’s mission to make the world's information accessible and useful for everyone. For 20 years, Google has made many products that are advertising-supported and thus free for everyone. It has done this while setting a high bar for transparency, control, and security. Ad-supported business models have delivered tremendous benefits for users, including an array of world-class productivity tools, levels of security that were previously only available to large multinational corporations, and vast amounts of free publisher content.

When it comes to privacy and data, Google has long been focused on three core goals: transparency, control, and security. We want people to understand their data, make the choices that are right for them, and be assured their data is safe. We have introduced a variety of new products and tools to help users understand how their data is used, to be transparent, and to provide users with greater security and control. This includes Google Account, the central destination to review and control privacy settings, and the privacy and security check-up.

Our policies continue to evolve. Last year, we refreshed our global privacy policy to better describe the information we collect, why we collect it, and how we use it. We also explain how users can update their settings and manage their account. We now includes illustrations and animated videos to make the experience more engaging and understandable. Over 500 million users visit this site every year. Privacy is not one-size-fits-all, and we are focused on building tools that enable people to make the privacy choices that are right for them. Different users want to make different choices about how much information they share and how it is used. Tools like privacy check-up allow users to understand how their data is being shared, and through Google Account they can change how their data is used at any time.

Google Account is used extensively. In 2018, 2.5 billion unique users visited Google Account. Nearly 20 million people visit every day, demonstrating not only that users are aware of the tools, but they are using them regularly to make informed choices.

Despite these advances in privacy, our work in this area is never done. We know the question of human transcription of audio recordings is of interest to this committee, and we want to share how Google approaches it. As part of our work to develop and improve speech recognition technology for more languages, we use language experts around the world who understand the nuances and accents of a specific language. The role of these language experts is to review and transcribe a small set of queries to help us better understand those languages to further improve our speech recognition technology. In recent months, we have heard concerns about our use of language experts in this context.

When we learned about these concerns, we took steps to suspend this process of human transcription globally in order to investigate, and to conduct a full review of our systems and controls. We have since communicated more information about how audio recordings work and some changes Google is making which include the following. By default, we do not retain audio recordings. This is already the case and will remain unchanged. We do not store users’ audio data unless they choose to opt in. Opting in helps the assistant better recognise a user’s voice over time, and also helps improve the assistant for everyone by allowing us to use audio to understand more languages and accents. Users can view their past interactions with the assistant on their Google Account page or My Activity page, and delete any of these interactions at any time.

We are making the involvement of human review more explicit to increase transparency. We will roll out a change that gives existing assistant users the option to review their Voice and Audio Activity setting and confirm their preference on human language review before any such review of assistant user audio resumes. We will not include new audio in the human review process unless users have confirmed the new setting, and of course users are free to decline.

We are enhancing privacy protections for our transcription process. We already take a number of precautions to protect data during human review, for example, audio snippets are not associated with user accounts during the transcription process and language experts only listen to a small set of queries - around 0.2% of all user audio snippets - only from users who opt in.

We are automatically deleting more audio data. One of the principles we strive toward is minimising the amount of data we store, and we are applying this to the Google Assistant as well. We are also updating our policy to vastly reduce the amount of audio data we store.

We thank the committee for providing us with the opportunity to contribute to its deliberations on this important topic. We believe in putting users in control of their data, and we always work to keep it safe. We are committed to being transparent about how our settings work so that users can decide what works best for them. We look forward to discussing our approach and welcome any questions committee members might have today.