Commentary
Amazon Alexa Listens, As Millions More Talk To It
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 28, 2016
Right on the heels of information that police are seeking past voice data thought to be recorded on Amazon’s Echo, comes word from the company that a huge number more of the devices are
entering homes.
Amazon said this holiday season was the best ever for it, with devices including Echo Dot and Amazon Echo topping the best-sellers list.
“Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year, and we’re thrilled that millions of new customers will be introduced to Alexa as a result,” said an Amazon statement.
Of course, this immediately follows word that police in Arkansas are using a search warrant to look for what may have been recorded on Alexa during the course of what police believe was a hot-tub murder, as I wrote about here yesterday (Police Want Amazon Echo To Help Solve A Murder).
Devices such as Alexa are activated by a certain word or phrase, such as Alexa or OK Google.
However, police in Arkansas are of the opinion that more than that may have been recorded and stored at Amazon.com during the time of the murder, since music was thought to have been playing via the device at the time.
The issue of connected devices listening to what is being said around them is still an early iteration of where voice technology is going.
In the future, the passive collection of nearby conversations and comments could be incorporated with artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide more relevant and valuable answers when queried.
With what it said were millions of new Alexa customers, Amazon provided some interesting stats on what they know about how consumers used Alexa during the holidays.
The favorite recipes from Alexa were for chocolate chip cookies and sugar cooking, Home Alone and Elf were the most requested holiday movies, the most requested drink mixes were Tom Collins and Manhattans and the most requested games were Jeopardy!, Twenty Questions and The Magic Door.
And that’s just the tip of what Amazon knows is flowing through Alexa.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
As I said this summer, Voice is the new app and Amazon Echo is proving it.
It'll be interesting to see how many Echo buyers start buying oen for every room. We can create experiences for the kitchen that would be very different for the bathroom, bedroom, etc. Echo is starting to push Voice the way American Idol pushed sms and text messaging.
Agree, Mark, have been documenting that for more than a year here.
Right, Doug, along with the ability of each device to know who in the household is interacting with it at the time.