Facebook will use its Viewpoints market research app, through which it has paid users to take surveys. Qualifying users will be asked to record the phrase “Hey Portal” followed by the first name of a friend in their friend list. If you participate, you’ll have to repeat the statement twice and do this with a set of 10 names in order to earn 200 points in the Viewpoints app. You have to earn 1,000 points to cash out, but you can record up to five sets of recordings to reach that threshold. That translates to $5, so each recording is worth five cents.

While you’re not going to get rich from the program, this is an interesting way for Facebook to improve its AI transcription skills without using your voice messages behind your back. Apple and Google have paused their audio transcription programs, and Amazon now lets users opt-out of audio recording “review.” But none of these companies seem to be offering cash in exchange for audio. Google does pay some users to take surveys, so it wouldn’t be too shocking if the company followed Facebook’s lead on this.

The company amended its privacy policy and other pages to make it clear human workers are listening to recorded conversations and commands to improve the services. “We realized, based on questions raised recently, that we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard, which spotted the policy tweaks.

“Our processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing,” the updated policy reads. Before the change, it wasn’t clear from the policy or Skype Translator FAQ that people were listening in — Skype only records voice conversations when translation features are enabled.

The company states on several pages that it uses voice data and recordings to improve speech recognition, translation, intent understanding and more across Microsoft products and services. “This may include transcription of audio recordings by Microsoft employees and vendors, subject to procedures designed to prioritize users’ privacy, including taking steps to de-identify data, requiring non-disclosure agreements with vendors and their employees, and requiring that vendors meet the high privacy standards set out in European law and elsewhere,” according to identical language on the Skype Translator FAQ, Cortana’s support section and a Microsoft privacy page.

While Microsoft allows users to delete audio recordings it makes of them through the privacy dashboard, it could have been more transparent from the outset as to what it was doing with that data. Apple plans to let Siri users opt out of the recordings soon, but it’s unclear whether Microsoft will follow suit.

In practice, the patent would allow Alexa to “look backward” at recent things said aloud prior to hearing its name. For example, if a user said something like, “What’s the weather going to be like today, Alexa?” the device would hear the trigger word “Alexa” and quickly go back over the prior phrase to process the command. To accomplish that, the voice assistant would constantly be recording, storing and processing speech, then quickly deleting it if it is not relevant.

Such a feature, if implemented, would provide considerable privacy concerns for users. The patent attempts to account for that, giving users the choice to allow Alexa to record and store audio for between 10 and 30 seconds at a time.

“The technology in this patent is not in use, and referring to the potential use of patents is highly speculative,” a spokesperson for Amazon told Engadget. “Like many companies, we file a number of forward-looking patent applications that explore new scientific ideas that may not make it into customer-facing products. Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect current or near-future state of products and services.”

If the patent ever were to make its way to your Alexa, the recording limit still may not be enough for some people. Amazon has already shown on several occasions that Alexa recordings aren’t as private as you may think. Recent reports revealed that Amazon employs a team of people who listen to and process Alexa recordings — and those auditors may have access to potentially personally identifiable information including location data. Amazon has also accidentally sent a user someone else’s Alexa recordings and was ordered by a court to surrender audio from a person’s smart speaker as part of an ongoing trial.