Amazon Echo is certainly wonderful, but what on earth are you listening to?

Cloud-based artificial intelligence that responds fluently enough to speak to people as they mistake "AlexaSpeaker type voice control terminal using "Amazon Echo"Has begun to respond to everything in everyday life, such as placing music, ordering pizza, calling taxis, and spotting items at Amazon. Users who actually tried using Echo understand the convenience of Echo, and at the same time, it seems that there is no doubt about the way Echo heard the voice data.

Amazon's Echo seems great, but what does it hear? | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/15/amazon-echo-is-great-but-what-does-it-hear

John Norton of The Guardian tried using Echo heard rumors that it is convenient. Mr. Norton thought that he needed it, he had a policy not to review items purchased with his own money, he said he purchased Echo because he felt it was an important product to himself. For the Echo series, the standard model "Amazon Echo"Compact, compact with BlutoothAmazon Tap"Mobile size"Echo DotThere are three types, but it seems that they bought the cheapest Echo Dot.


In Echo, the phrase "Alexa (Alexa)" becomes a command, the recognized voice is sent to Amazon's cloud, and the answer is fed back. Therefore, in order to use Echo, every time we call "Alexa", Mr. Norton says that the act of talking to Echo was initially a strange feeling.

According to Mr. Norton, the part that is most impressed by Echo users is that they are fast response speed. Note that the very short time of 1 second from the questioner to the answer can be confirmed in the following article that Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos was the harsh proposition imposed on Echo's development team.

Speaker type audio assistant who became the biggest hit item in Amazon hardware history "Amazon Echo" The birth of secret story - GIGAZINE


Of course, there seems to be a scene where Alexa can not answer well, but since Amazon incorporates machine learning, the more users of Echo and the more inputs, the better the accuracy of Alexa's answer It can be expected.

Norton has two points that Echo feels is an important product. One thing is that Echo is targeting "home" and is working on "voice control" that is more user-friendly than touch operation. Second, because Echo has a very high affinity with IoT products, we can incorporate the rapidly growing IoT ecosystem. At the moment, many IoT terminals are forced to cooperate with smartphones, but smartphones are hard to use for home use of IoT terminals, and products like Echo are more suitable.

The situation that Amazon is steadily building the status of "operating system" as a hub to control every product in the home using Alexa is explained in the following article.

Amazon's speech recognition "Alexa" is sweeping the world's IoT and becoming the champion of "next to smartphone" platform - GIGAZINE


Mr. Norton who confirmed using Echo the sound control was comfortable and completely unhappy, felt it was a convenient and wonderful product as I imagined, but at the same time, "Where is Alexa heard what I heard? I thought about the question "Is it?" It is clear that the user's "privacy problem" is hiding in Echo who is in the center of the family and listening to everything. About this point Amazon says "Echo always listens, but I am not recording, I will send audio data to the cloud for the first time after checking the trigger word" Alexa ", and I've begun to answer privacy, Mr. Norton seems to feel it is trying to get better.

However, the US user who suspects Amazon 's word is surely there, and in the trial of the murder incident occurred in Alaska it seems that it is required to submit the voice data recorded by Echo in order to investigate the truth of the incident. In any case, using Echo Mr. Norton says "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral (technology is not evil unless good is not neutral)"KranzburgIt seems that I re-examine the first law of.