Smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo and Apple HomePod are hearing your conversations and probably recording them as well. But what you might not have known is these companies have humans sitting behind the desk and listening to your chats.

This has been reported by Bloomberg on Thursday, which says that Amazon has thousands of people on board, who’re basically there to listen to users’ conversations, transcribe them and feed it back into software, to help Alexa learn human interaction better.

After all, that’s how machine learning adapts itself, where humans feed information into machines, in this case Alexa, the voice assistant. So, the next time you hear Amazon saying ‘all the Alexa recordings are kept on the cloud’ it’s going to be hard to believe them.