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to Amazon’s assistant, Alexa – and through it, to Amazon’s vast store of physical and digital goods and services. However, in so many other ways, the Echo represents a crucial first foothold from which the online giant might more closely integrate itself into full-time domestic life. The Echo and products like it (Google’s Homedevice, Lenovo’s Smart Assistant and others) each provide broadly similar feature sets and interact with their user in similar ways. Each waits in silence, microphone primed, awaiting a simple ‘wake word’. On hearing “Alexa”, “Ok Google” or something similar, the device triggers a more complex audio processing circuit. In this active state, the Echo records a user’s voice, packages the audio into compressed form, uploads the clip for processing through Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) platform and delivers a response which Alexa latency internet connection, the whole process can be completed in less than a second. The great advantage of the Echo’s approach here lies in its ‘always on’, mains- powered design. Unlike similar assistants (eg, Apple’s phone and tablet-based Siri), by giving Alexa a permanent physical home in the home, Amazon’s assistant is detached from concerns around battery life and can provide a constant, permanent connection to Amazon’s services. Alexa comes out of the box with a variety of so-called ‘skills’. Its talents range from simple requests (“Alexa, play Justin Bieber”), to shopping (“Alexa, add Tabasco to my shopping list”), to more complex smart home integrations (“Alexa, dim the kitchen lights to 50%”). Alexa can vocalises through the Echo’s inbuilt speakers. With a low-
also answer simple and complex questions (eg, “When is the next train to St Pancras?”, “How tall is Donald Trump?” and so on). Each of these functions provides Amazon with both obvious revenue opportunities (media streamed through its online services, products purchased through its store) and more subtle, though arguably even more valuable, user data, through which Amazon can build better user profiles. As more and more users grant Alexa access to their daily lives, AWS’s machine learning platform is able to better understand and assist each user, much as Google’s ad-sense platform learns to better target ads over time to specific demographics. However, unlike Google’s approach and indeed unlike Apple’s phone, tablet and Mac-based Siri, Alexa is an open platform. Third parties can – and increasingly have – developed and expanded the assistant’s functionality far beyond its initial abilities. Looking forward, expect Alexa (and its competitors) to be tied ever closer to home automation products and connected services. Right now, a Jetsonian future of connected fridges triggering Amazon Fresh deliveries on discovery of limited supplies is months, not years, away. Home invasion It is this potent cocktail of always- on connectivity, rich third-party extensibility and Amazon’s aggressive development of machine learning that explains both Alexa’s future potential and the very real risks such devices might pose to individual privacy now. In 2016 we saw reports of police in Georgia issuing search warrants to Amazon in the hope of obtaining recordings from an Echo owner’s home in which a body was found.
For its part, Amazon staunchly maintains that the Echo may only record and upload audio following a ‘wake word’ trigger. However, such statements may be of little comfort in a world in which the privacy policy for Samsung’s latest line of smart TVs reads “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted”. In addition, recent commentary from the US legal press suggests that the Echo’s inability to discriminate the age of individuals from which it stores recordings may flout the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prohibits the recording of people younger than 13. COPPA provides for fines of up to $16,000 per infringement for any company found to be in breach of this provision. Amazon has shipped over five million Echo units in the United States in the past two years. An interesting consideration. Regardless of whether such concerns are founded at present, what is clear is the appetite among the public for smart, connected devices and an apparent general apathy toward any consequent privacy considerations. In a world in which nefarious access to the data collected by such devices by both state and private parties is rarely out of the news, it is not unreasonable to wonder how long this current enthusiasm might last, and indeed how far away fresh legislation in this space might be. Conclusion How then to react Alexa and her stable mates? Should those concerned with privacy baulk at the notion of a matte plastic corporate outpost assuming full-time living room residency? Do the Echo
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