Why The Future Of Amazon's Alexa Promises To Be Both Complicated And Ubiquitous

Thoughts as various new echo devices break cover

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

The days when Amazon’s Echo smart speaker was deemed a mere novelty now seem like a distant memory. At an excitingly packed event in Seattle, the online-store-turned-tech-company unveiled a staggeringly large array of new devices housing the now-iconic voice assistant Alexa, providing us with a tantalizing insight into how Alexa could extend its reach far outside the home. However, as the assistant becomes more ubiquitous, could familiar issues about privacy grow in complexity?

PRIVACY CONCERNS CONTINUE TO LINGER

It’s not that Amazon didn’t acknowledge the whole issue of privacy as the Seattle event opened. In August, Bloomberg reported that Amazon had decided to allow Alexa users to opt out of their voice recordings being human-assessed through a program designed to improve the assistant’s responses. “We’re investing in privacy across the board,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s hardware and services chief, explained in Seattle, scotching the idea of privacy as an afterthought across Amazon devices and services.

Limp elaborated that privacy “has to be foundational and built in from the beginning for every piece of hardware, software and service that we create.” To that end, Amazon is now allowing Alexa users to ask the assistant “Alexa, tell me what you heard” to learn precisely what it has recorded. One setting now paves the way for Alexa to regularly delete old recordings, while Echo Show smart displays have even each been given a manual shutter.

However, not all tech observers were convinced by Amazon’s privacy-focused rhetoric and policies.