What are you doing with Alexa?

[Randy]

And just wait until Alexa takes control of your car and drives it off a cliff with you in it because "she" thinks you've been cheating on her!

Jeff's Doro Flip Phone is probably secretly doing the same thing and tracking his every move he just hasn't figured it out yet. One day when he least expects it his Doro will profess its undying love for him.

 

[Flint]

I think since Alexa's microphones are really sensitive, you can activate it if you say your wake up word by mistake. I changed the wake up word on one of my Dots to " computer " and if you have Star Trek on it will respond every time someone on TV says " computer ". Even on my daily news feed from Alexa, any ad that says, "Alexa" will stop the news and pause since Alexa is waiting for your next command. Ameritrade has an ad that says, "Alexa, enable the Ameritrade skill" and Alexa stops my news and says which skill? And I always have to say cancel then it continues reading my news

It wakes up when it hears the wake word, but not before. So it is not recording everything it hears.

When it wakes up, it starts send the sound it is listening to into the cloud which also has sound from everyone else with an echo. If a TV show causes a wake up, that dialog is quickly recognized as a entertainment source in the cloud. Only the first hundred or so echoes should respond as after those the system will know that clearly it isn't you talking since the same audio is coming from all over the user community.

You can turn in voice recognition so it can tell you apart from others which will reduce false responses. I haven't used it, so I dont know how well it works.

You can also mute the mic when you dont want to be disturbed.

 

[Huey]

It may not be recording, but it is listening to everything you say, so in theory, there could be a log of it somewhere, although I don't see that as a plausible thing for them to do.

 

[Flint]

It may not be recording, but it is listening to everything you say, so in theory, there could be a log of it somewhere, although I don't see that as a plausible thing for them to do.

Actually, no. The chip itself is internally programmed to listen without creating any sort of log at all. It is just waiting to hear the wakeup word which is programmed into the hardware. Once it hears the wakeup word it starts recording and translating to text. The software in the cloud decides whether to do something or turn off listening. Some skills get locally stored on the device to speed response, but they are not activated until the chip hears the wakeup word.

This was a major requirement from the chip makers before any devices were made to listen without you having to actively telling it to listen for several reasons, one major one being security. They also needed to reduce data traffic, increase battery time, and reduce false commands.