Amazon has filed a patent that would allow its Alexa voice assistant to respond no matter where you say her name in your command.
“Play The Lost Boys soundtrack, Alexa,” for example, would be just as effective as placing the wake word at the beginning of the sentence.
This system means that these recordings would not need to be sent to the Amazon servers, thus reducing concerns over Alexa snooping on users’ conversations.
“The technology in this patent is not in use, and referring to the potential use of patents is highly speculative,” warned an Amazon spokesperson in a statement to Buzzfeed News.
Though this particular technology should not mean any greater exposure to Amazon’s eavesdropping, the company’s privacy protocols are far from flawless. In May 2018, an Echo device accidentally sent a voice message containing a private conversation to one of the owner’s contacts.
The patent would allow users to reduce the recordings to a maximum of 10 seconds, but there’s no mention of whether the feature could be switched off entirely.
