A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company's smart speaker systems. This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence.
Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant system that runs on the company's Echo series of smart speakers, works by listening out for a 'wakeword' that tells the device to turn on its extended speech recognition systems in order to respond to spoken commands.
On Amazon's devices, the wakeword is 'Alexa', but similar systems control how Apple devices work ('Hey Siri') and also Google's ('Hey Google'), not to mention products from other tech companies.
In theory, Alexa-enabled devices will only record what you say directly after the wakeword, which is then uploaded to Amazon, where remote servers use speech recognition to deduce your meaning, then relay commands back to your local speaker.
But one issue in this flow of events, as Amazon's recently revealed patent application argues, is it means that anything you say before the wakeword isn't actually heard.
"A user may not always structure a spoken command in the form of a wakeword followed by a command (eg. 'Alexa, play some music')," the Amazon authors
explain in their patent application, which was filed back in January, but only became public last week.
"Instead, a user may include the command before the wakeword (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa') or even insert the wakeword in the middle of a command (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa, the Beatles please'). While such phrasings may be natural for a user, current speech processing systems are not configured to handle commands that are not preceded by a wakeword."
Rather than only record what is said after the wakeword is spoken, the system described in the patent application would effectively continuously record all speech, then look for instances of commands issued by a person.
"The [proposed] system is configured to capture speech that precedes and/or follows a wakeword," the application explains, "such that the speech associated with the command and wakeword can be included together and considered part of a single utterance that may be processed by a system."
It's actually a clever idea, similar as others have noted to Apple's introduction of its Live Photos feature in the iPhone in 2015.
In that implementation, as soon as you open the iPhone's Camera app, the camera starts surreptitiously filming footage, even before you hit the shutter button icon to take your photo.
In fact, even once you've hit the shutter button, the camera keeps recording, and you ultimately end up with a mini movie (aka 'Live Photo') that extends for a moment on either side of the still image you manually snapped.
More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...-alexa-can-get
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