'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft

Interpreting a spoken request isn't magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible

"Do you believe in magic?" Google asked attendees of its annual developer conference this May, playing the seminal Lovin' Spoonful tune as an introduction. Throughout the three-day event, company executives repeatedly answered yes while touting new features of the Google Assistant, the company's version of Alexa or Siri, that can indeed feel magical. The tool can book you a rental car, tell you what the weather is like at your mother's house, and even interpret live conversations across 26 languages.

But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference - "Keep making magic" - obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.