Re: alexa

Actually, if you go into the app, it shows you what it has heard and wheat it thought it heard. You can listen to all the recordings or delete them. Talking to people at Apple and Google there are some phrases and words that are consistently misinterpreted and so the recordings are listened to and new rules applied. Has anyone ever read the privacy policy? I did and went in with my eyes open, and can say that from what I can tell no personal information has been shared that should not have been by any of the home assistant staff. The worry for most is more of one of hacking into the system in some way by an outside party. Will some governments insist on this back door? That would be worrying but until it happens we will not know if existing wire tap rules are sufficient. It is actually far easier to monitor the microphone of a speaker phone than it is a home assistant. Also the button on the Alexa at least is an internal hardware driven switch, so without access to the unit itself it cannot be patched by software externally. Brian

You would be surprised how good the A lady is I think. Its only though by human tweaking that it has improved. Voice systems over the phone are bad as they have to deal with the awful quality of the telephone and its network. I'm surprised from a mobile it can understand anything at all!

As I say, there is a button on the unit to deactivate it in hardware, or the paranoid can simply pull the power plug out if they want to engage in private chatting. If you have a fobile Mone then you stand a better chance of being listened to as googles Android system is not that hard to fiddle with when its connected to wifi. Brian

Brian Gaff explained :

I am also surprised by just how good Siri is on the Iphone. Its the first time I have used speech to text.

Mine is a Nokia N70, code named Rolf after the infamous Mr.Harris

Be exact, they've been listening to your questions, not what's going on in the room.

The compute power to record everything from everyone's Echo would be prohibitively expensive.

Andy

You might be right about how good "she" is. But still, no thanks.

In other words, Brian: technology is great. But it requires constant, unceasing, time-consuming -- *very* time-consuming -- intervention and learning not only on the part of the creators, but -- far more importantly -- on the part of the users.

The creators are paid to turn up for work and do all that. We are not, and we have far better things to do ... but it's surprising to me, how many innocents pour their daily lives into re-re-re-learning their technologies.

F*ck all of them "pour their daily lives into re-re-re-learning their technologies."