Facebook offers paying users for their voice recordings

The social media giant Facebook has decided to start paying users for their voice recordings which will be utilised for improving speech recognition technology.

The latest announcement was followed by other leading companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft when Facebook was caught listening to and transcribing voice recordings to improve speech recognition systems without informing customers it was doing so, reported The Verge.

As part of a new program called ‘“Pronunciations’, Facebook will let you make voice recordings for its Viewpoints market research app.

If you qualify to be part of the program, Facebook says you’ll be able to record the phrase “Hey Portal” followed by the first name of a friend from your friends list. You’ll be able to do this with the names of up to 10 friends, and you have to record each statement twice.

The payments will not be as much as users are expecting, however, if one is completing one set of recordings, the user will get 200 points in the Viewpoints app. The payment cannot be withdrawn as cash in the Viewpoints app until the user earns at least 1,000 points.

That only translates to a $5 reward via PayPal. However, Facebook says users may be offered the opportunity to make up to five sets of recordings, so there is the potential to meet that 1,000-point goal and get paid, said the report.

The announcement stated that the voice recordings users provide will not be connected to their Facebook profile and that the company doesn’t share Viewpoints activity on Facebook or other Facebook-owned services without permission.

The Pronunciations program will be available to US users over the age of 18 that have more than 75 Facebook friends, whereas, it will be rolling the program out slowly, so it won’t be available to all users right away. If it’s made available to you, you won’t need to update the Viewpoints app to see it pop up, the company says.