Amazon Alexa crowdsourcing unanswerable questions?

On September 12th, Amazon unveiled Alexa Answers, a program that crowdsources questions that Alexa, its voice recognition assistant, cannot answer.

Alexa Answers began operating the test in December of last year as an invitation. Anyone logged in with the Amazon account that was released this time can post responses. When you log in to Amazon Answers, it tells you to answer questions that match your interests and expertise. They ask you to refrain from pretending to know or misinformation.

User responses are fully disclosed as Amazon customer responses. Statistics such as the number of responses posted so far, evaluations, and shares are displayed on a dashboard to motivate respondents. Of course, some point out that such a question is more likely to be searched on Google than Alexa.

According to reports, Amazon does not even require authors to specify the source of the data. In other words, it may be a problem with Amazon without a search engine, but it is pointed out that there is a good chance that fake information will rise.

Alexa’s vice president, Bill Barton, says Amazon is based on the positive energy and integrity of the participants, and that some problematic posts will be safely removed using machine learning and algorithms. Related information can be found here .