Alexa creepily recorded a family’s private conversations, sent them to business associate — from usatoday.com by Elizabeth Weise
Excerpt:
In this instance, a random series of disconnected conversations got interpreted by Alexa as a specific and connected series of commands.
It doesn’t appear that the family members actually heard Alexa asking who it should send a message to, or confirming that it should be sent.
That’s probably a function of how good the Echo’s far field voice recognition is. Each speaker has seven microphones which are arrayed so the cylindrical speaker can pick up voice commands from far away or even in noisy rooms with lots of conversations going on.
Amazon says it is evaluating options to make cases such as happened to the Portland family less likely.
But given that Forrester predicts by 2020 almost 50% of American households will contain a smart speaker, expect more such confusions in the future.