It's not just Amazon's Alexa that is listening in on your commands. A new report from Dutch publication VRT NWS reveals that Google is also keeping an ear on our conversations. It claims the technology company hires independent contractors around the world to listen to and transcribe audio recordings picked up by Google Assistant in order to improve the technology. A Google spokesman confirmed this in a statement to Business Insider and said its language experts transcribed ‘a small set of queries’ – about 0.2% of all audio snippets – and that this work was ‘critical’ to developing technology that powers products such as Google Assistant. It said the aim was to make Google Assistant understand commands from people who speak in different languages and accents.