Posted on 02/15/2017 9:50:34 AM PST by C19fan
Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are considering a new use for their popular home speakers: becoming the home phone.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Alexa?
More likely they configure them for 24 hour a day audio monitoring.
Aren’t they already?
You say “Alexa ...” or “Google ...” and they’re right there, answering your question.
Bingo. Tap the phone and just listen to whatever happens in the house. Big Brother is here.
They already are. Unless you turn it off, Alexa is always listening.
And people are imposing it upon themselves.
This would be a huge boon for elderly people with limited mobility....
Can’t read the article when it will be available from Amazon...not a WSJ subscriber
Does it say when?
"Fujitsu-san! Konichi-wa!"
"You are terminated!"
(printers all over the house print out, "YOU'RE FIRED!!!!")
I bought 2 Google Home units the day they came out. I love them. We say “Hey Google” 25 times a day min.
Hey Google... Play KIXW on Home Group (Or whatever station you prefer)
Plays Rush on my Family Room and Bedroom units.
Great gadget.
Had to change wake word on my Amazon Dot. Local iHeart station played a commercial “Alexa play iHeart radio” kept turning the thing on. Changed wake word to Computer
There’s a difference between “listening” and “transmitting.” We ran network trace tests of an Echo for a week and found that the device transmits data once a day if not used, and it’s a beacon check for updates. This happens even if you have the device muted. The amount of data transmitted was less than 1 kb if there were no updates.
An out-of-the-box Echo has no open ports, no management interface, and even with Bluetooth, it’s not possible to change the device without taking out its guts and reprogramming the individual EEPROMs.
“Alexa” or “Echo” or “Amazon” are keywords that the device knows to recognize, and yes, what you say is uploaded to the Amazon cloud, but other than words spoken directly after, there’s no other data uploaded to Amazon without you knowing, and they provide methods to delete recorded data.
At what point does it stop collecting data?
I have a dot in the house so that is good news. I guess that the police dept suing Amazon to get recordings are going to be out of luck.
If you’ve ever used one, you might know the frustration of it only getting half of what you said. It detects a lengthy pause and starts its search thereafter. You can’t start saying something and just leave the mic open. It’s designed to search for things that it doesn’t natively understand, so it’s not going to wait for input for very long.
After it has cleaned out all of your funds and you've been committed to the looney bin.
It dindu nuffin mo, 'cause it got nuffin to do.
If you’re being attacked and have the presence of mind to yell for Alexa, I wouldn’t count on much more than a final memory of your last words being stored on a cloud server somewhere. As of right now, it’s functionally useless for spying.
Alexa told me that George Soros was a prominent philanthropist.
Now that is one dumb brick!
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