Alexa - our hearty helper or a heartless spy?

Nowadays days people rely heavily on high technology. For example, Amazon’s Alexa, which is designed to help and entertain us.

According to Wikipedia: “Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence technology developed by Amazon…It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.”

Amazon is constantly working to make Alexa "more human". For example: "What's the weather going to be today, Alexa?" Or use their own activation word instead. This more natural human interaction has been the subject of an Amazon patent since 2019.

Alexa will keep listening

However, there is a big problem here, for this to work well. Alexa has to put everything it hears into a buffer (on their servers), at least temporarily. So does this result in monitoring and limiting our privacy? Unless its mic is turned off, Alexa is always listening. According to Amazon, it only sends cached data to them when the activation word completes the sentence. Also the user can choose between 10 or 30 seconds of caching. However, our verbal conversations within earshot may no longer be entirely private ...

Does Alexa use her own activation words?

We cannot be sure. Amazon is constantly battling accusations. For example, it recently been claimed that Amazon employees are manually analysing the Alexa records of individual users. Creepy... 

Let us know in the comments, what do you think about it?

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