Alexa is always listening — and so are Amazon workers

It's not just Alexa listening when you talk to her.

Sometimes there's Amazon workers tuning in as well, the company confirmed on Thursday.

Amazon workers around the world listen in to help make its artificial intelligence, aka Alexa, smarter, the company said.

"This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone," a company spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to ABC News.

Echo devices, Amazon's smart speakers, respond to keyword-detecting technology to know when a "wake word" like "Alexa" is uttered, and then stores and send the commands to the cloud, the company said.

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“By default, Echo devices are designed to detect only your chosen wake word (Alexa, Amazon, Computer or Echo). The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word. No audio is stored or sent to the cloud unless the device detects the wake word (or Alexa is activated by pressing a button)," the statement said.

The existence of these teams was first reported by Bloomberg, who reported that the company has hired thousands of employees and contractors around the world, including in Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania to review, transcribe, mark up and then feed back the information into its software to improve Alexa's grasp of language and voice commands.

Read more of this story from ABC News here.

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