Why is the Amazon Echo's microphone mute a more costly physical button?
Amazon's smart speaker, Echo , has a physical button to turn the microphone on and off in all models. Echo can be operated by voice or linked to a smartphone to change settings from an app, but Amazon's chief engineer explains why the microphone switch is a physical button.
Contrast this to Amazon: during design of the original Echo at Lab126, an engine... | Hacker News
Below is a top-down view of the Echo 3rd generation (2019) on the left and the Echo 2nd generation (2017) on the right. The button on the left side of the Echo 3rd generation and the microphone button on the bottom of the Echo 2nd generation are physical buttons for turning the microphone input on and off.
Also, below is the palm-sized
On Echo Show with a monitor, you can turn the microphone on and off with a slider instead of a button. Below is a product image of the Echo Show 5 (3rd generation) to be released in 2023.
The microphone button on the Echo series was explained by illumin8, who claims to be a principal engineer at Amazon, on the social site Hacker News in 2019. According to illumin8, implementing the microphone mute function in software would be less costly in terms of component requirements than physically disconnecting the microphone circuitry.
However, Amazon's engineering team pushed ahead with a design in which the microphone circuitry is physically disconnected by a physical button, rather than a cheaper software control. This design is Amazon's commitment to privacy, illumin8 said. Alexa, the AI assistant built into Echo, always stores the voices spoken to it for data training, and it is known that the voice data that Alexa hears is analyzed by Amazon employees. In the past, there have been incidents in which conversations between men and women who were not speaking to Alexa were recorded without permission and sent to a completely unrelated third party.
Alexa sends recorded conversation data to a completely unrelated third party - GIGAZINE
If you are concerned about the possibility that your everyday conversations may be recorded by your Echo, you should mute your Echo. The mute function for this purpose can be implemented in the software, which is inexpensive. However, according to illumin8, Amazon's engineering team predicted that 'future engineering teams will remove the mute function through software updates,' so they made the microphone on/off with a physical circuit. 'I'm proud of the approach Amazon takes to privacy. The privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing for Amazon, and this customer-focused attitude ( first principle of leadership ) permeates the entire organization,' illumin8 said in a 2019 comment.
On the other hand, following the announcement of ' Alexa+ ' equipped with generative AI in February 2025, Amazon has informed some users of the smart speaker 'Echo' that 'the option to locally store and process what you say to Alexa will end on March 28, 2025.' This means that while previously you could choose whether or not to allow 'conversations with Alexa to be used for training,' after March 29, 2025 you will no longer be able to 'turn off the use of voice recordings,' and all voice recordings spoken to Alexa will be automatically sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
Amazon to remove 'Do not send Echo recording data to Amazon's cloud' feature on March 28, 2025, so that all recordings will be sent to Amazon's cloud - GIGAZINE
However, Amazon explains that 'Voice requests to Alexa are always encrypted as they are transmitted to Amazon's secure cloud, and are designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe,' indicating its intention to take privacy seriously.
Related Posts:
in Hardware, Posted by log1e_dh