Some Amazon Echo owners say they can't listen to audio bits, accidentally recorded by Alexa
Only a programmed "wake-up" word – either "Alexa", "Amazon", "Computer" or "Echo" – should enable Amazon's voice-activated Alexa devices. But sometimes, when someone says words with similar sounds, the speaker can accidentally be turned on and will record conversations. Previously, users could listen to all Alexa prisoners, including accidental recordings, through their Amazon account. But recently, the Alexa app stopped accessing these clippings.
The owners told BuzzFeed News that in the playback history section of the Alexa app, the records appeared as " Text not available. Click to play recording. " After clicking, the game button was grayed out and they could Don't choose it. The app was displayed " The sound was not intended for echo-nothing was returned " during the playback button. After testing this, BuzzFeed News found at least a dozen cases where unintentional triggers could not be played.
After BuzzFeed News reported the problem to Amazon, a spokesman said, "This is a mistake and we are working on a solution. It should start rolling out early next week." The spokesman added that users can still visit amazon.com/ alexaprivacy to see, listen to and delete past voice recordings, including random. While the playback is currently experiencing issues in the Alexa app, the website can play all the footage Amazon has stored on its servers.
Frank Garritano, an echo owner living in Northern California, was unnerved by the large number of scraps marked "not intended for echoes" in his Alexa app.
"Basically, I'm told we're listening to this recording, it was not German for an Alexa request, so we decided that you could not listen to I am the person being recorded, says Garritano to BuzzFeed News
Ian Mercer, who also owns an echo device, said that the Alexa app had at least two of these footage on each side of its story, "Why does it even log if it doesn't sign up?" Mercer said.
Mercer has worked with what he calls "the world's smartest house" that incorporates some voice-activated technology that is not powered by Alexa or other tech-supported voice assistants, such as Siri or Google Assistant. "I prefer a device where sound recognition is done on the device, rather than on the cloud, "He said and said it was private life and faster response times.
Earlier this week, a Bloomberg report revealed that a team in Amazon is listening to the user's audio bits recorded by devices that have accidentally recorded audio. Those working with this team told Bloomberg that they, among other things, have been recording what appeared to be a woman singing in the shower, a child screaming and a sexual assault.
While Amazon's privacy policy states that Alexa's software shares your Alexa interactions with the company, it does not explicitly describe how employees interact with the data.
In a sent statement to BuzzFeed News, an Amazon spokesman wrote that "an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings" is marked, and the review of the sound "helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems."
It is a good reminder that a voice-activated system can hear when you haven't thought about it. You can always press the microphone button to disable the microphone on the Amazon Echo, or of course you can disconnect it.
