So we know that they have a record of every query that Alexa has detected. I'm guessing what you're questioning is whether they're storing the actual voices so that they can differentiate between different people that have queried Alexa.
I'm quite confident that they store the voice data. It's very valuable to them as a source of training data for future versions of 'Alexa'-like products.
Definitely, as well as being able to eventually differentiate between mom, dad, and the kids.
As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I s…
I think there's a stronger mental disconnect here in a lot of consumers. Detecting the wake word is easy to do locally; doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally. Because the wake word is able to be processed offline, there is no need for the Echo device to record and transmit audio all the…
Exactly. There is no cost model that accounts for the device constantly streaming realtime audio data to Amazon. Just doesn't make sense.
So just because my phone is potentially not secure means I should just open up my home to all other sorts of intrusion/attacks? Yes, phones generally can do that, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about what the Echo is doing.
No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. You're seriously willing to carry smartphones, which have both microphones and cameras, and give no indication visible or otherwise, of when they are listening or recording or sending data, and run whatever dodgy code some asian devi…
In defense of the downvotes (albeit its bad manners whoever is downvoting you), camera / mic LEDs are nonsense. They are all software controlled, and the control software is almost always proprietary, and thus you cannot trust those either.
Additionally, I'm pretty sure the Amazon Echo is just rebranded third party mic / soc boards put together by Amazon. It is still "asian device manufacturer" firmware.
Hypothetically, if I was tasked with recording everything, I'd just add an internal buffer and then ship chunks of that data along with the regular queries.
Indeed, yes, that'd be the way to do it. You could claim the post-wake-word data is recorded at a higher bit rate than it actually is, thereby accounting for the larger than necessary data-transfer. I won't be surprised if we find out this is happening. They'll probably call it a "bug", fix it in an OTA, but then accidentally regress 6 months later.
This is not happening. Period. Amazon takes customer trust very very very very seriously.
Alexa listens only to the words after the wake word. What's more it doesn't capture more than 10-12s past the wake word. If you have a device you can check this yourself (Alexa, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…). It's actually hard to get it to capture this much. Take a breath or pause to long and capture stops sooner. The request of the police is nutty and indicative of not understanding the technology. Unless the…
TheInformation's article includes a bit more info and this tidbit: > As most owners probably have experienced, the microphones can often be triggered inadvertently. And those errant recordings, like ambient sound or partial conversations, are sent to Amazon’s servers just like any other. When I use my Echo in my apartment alone I don't have a lot of false positives on the wake-word detector. This past week I've been…
Absolutely right. The people here gleefully, cynically dismissing this as police stupidity would be demanding the police investigate even the smallest lead to help get justice for the murder of a loved one. If there's even a small chance the always-activated audio recording device in someone's home was inadvertently activated in the commotion, why wouldn't the police investigate it as an option? Even if there's not a recording of "help amazon my husband is murdering me," what was captured may help verify other evidence or set a timeline. Hell, even being able to prove the crime had or had not taken place at a certain hour based on whether Alexa was being used for its usual purpose is potential evidence.
No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. You're seriously willing to carry smartphones, which have both microphones and cameras, and give no indication visible or otherwise, of when they are listening or recording or sending data, and run whatever dodgy code some asian devi…
In defense of the downvotes (albeit its bad manners whoever is downvoting you), camera / mic LEDs are nonsense. They are all software controlled, and the control software is almost always proprietary, and thus you cannot trust those either. Additionally, I'm pretty sure the Amazon Echo is just rebranded third party mic / soc boards put together by Amazon. It is still "asian device manufacturer" firmware.
No need for speculation: you can open the Alexa app and play back your own queries, audio and all. There's even a help section titled, "How do I delete Alexa voice recordings", which reads: "You can delete specific voice recordings associated with your account by going to History in Settings in the Alexa App, drilling down for a specific entry, and then tapping the delete button. Or, you can delete all voice recordin…
Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.
The 'Alexa' voice recognition is done on the client, not on the server. Once the trigger word has been spoken, the audio data begins streaming to the server.
According to others in the thread (i know nothing of this) , it sounds like that is easily verifiable though, and not done. Ie, it sounds like they've monitored the outbound traffic of the device and it only sends Alexa... requests. It's possible that they keep a rolling buffer of all audio in the device though. There could be legitimate reason to hold onto such a window of audio. Would make for an interesting discov…
What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?
I could imagine trying to capture and analyze at least a few words leading up to the trigger word of 'Alexa' to help make it more accurate.
Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.
I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)
I think they're talking about the distinction between the actual audio, which can be listened to and deleted from the Alexa app, and the processed data breaking it down into a (potential) query, possibly sitting nowhere but some query logs for underlying services.