Quote:
In the patent application, the authors explain that your Echo device would only ever record between 10–30 seconds of audio at a time, before wiping it from the local memory buffer, and recording a new 10–30 seconds of audio over it (again and again).
In each of these 10–30 second recordings, the device would continuously scan looking for commands involving the wakeword, and if it didn't find any, they'd get deleted forever – in theory, at least.
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This is not as bad as it initially sounded, assuming the servers never get to process the 10-30 second recordings unless the wake word is heard therein. It works similar to a black box on an airplane and continuously records over the previous time allotted recording. I’m okay with that if indeed they only send the short recording to the server when it hears the wake work. I really doubt Amazon would want every Alexa device to send recordings to their servers 24x7xForever. There is no way they could process nor store that much audio.
I’m more concerned about Alexa and similar competitive devices being hacked so some unauthorized person could listen to everything.