Pretty soon your Alexa virtual assistant is going to record all the conversations which take place before it or in the room of its operation. Yes, you’ve read it right! And that too without the name of ‘Alexa’ pronounced first.
A new patent filed by Amazon might make the virtual assistant start listening before its ‘wake word’ is said. And this will surely raise the privacy concerns among the users of Alexa soon.
Till date, Amazon has been insisting on the fact that its virtual assistants only operate when the ‘Wake words- Echo, Computer, Alexa’ are uttered.
Pretty soon the process is going to change as the tech giant feels that users may not always structure a spoken command in the form of a wake word while using their virtual assistant. So, anything and everything spoke before the device will likely be captured- raising serious privacy concerns.
Amazon has reacted to the media reports and stated that the conversations in the length of 30 seconds will only be processed and then wiped from the hard drive when the new ones emerge.
Some sources from the retail giant said that such patent’s often never seen light and might get archived as the feasibility of certain technicalities has to be determined and analyzed before presenting them to the world. But that doesn’t discourage companies from filing a number of forward-looking patent apps.
Note- Alexa is virtual assistant software which runs in the Amazon Echo speakers.
