[haertig]

A lot of people don't understand how Alexa works and are spreading fear based on their (usually incorrect) assumptions.

Alexa does not send anything up to Amazon until AFTER the device is "woken up". By default that is when someone says "Alexa". The device is listening for it's wake word all the time, but it is only listening locally. Meaning it's the device itself that recognizes the wake word. It does not send everything it hears up to the internet for something on the internet to detect the wake word. You can prove this by turning off your internet connection - unplugging the Ethernet cable that connects your modem/router to the internet will do it. Or powering down your router. Then say something like "Alexa, what is the temperature?" Sure enough, your device will wake up (because it detected the wake word locally), but instead of telling you the temperature, it will tell you that it doesn't understand, can't connect to the internet, or some other error message. Congratulations! You just proved that the device detects the wake word locally, just like Amazon said it does, in case you don't believe what Amazon says.

Now, can the device wake up on it's own without you saying the wake word? Sometimes. Say you have a TV going in the background and someone on the show says "Alexa". Yep, your device will wake up even though it was just the stupid TV set saying the wake word. I imagine the same thing would happen if you have a talkative parrot as a pet and the bird likes to say "Alexa". I have had a couple of cases where I said something similar to "Alexa" and the device mistook what I said as the wake word. This is infrequent. It happens maybe once every three months for me. Also, I have had one or two occurrences over several years of Alexa waking up in a dead silent household and start talking on her own - usually saying something like "I don't understand". This is very very rare, but it has happened to me. So yes, Alexa can and does accidentally wake up on very infrequent occasions. You know that Alexa has woken up and is listening and sending things over the internet because there is a blue ring that lights up on the Echo device. This blue light will come on after the wake word is recognized, indication that everything you say hence force will be sent up to Amazon over the internet. After a few seconds of (your) silence, the device stops sending stuff to the internet and the blue light turns off. If you never want the device to listen you can push a button to lock the microphone out. That renders the device useless, but hey, you can do that if you want. Push the button again to unlock the microphone.

Once the device has woken up, default behavior is to send your voice recording to Amazon over the internet for analysis and to generate a response. If you do not want your voice recording to go up to Amazon you can change the Alexa configuration (via the Alexa app) to "Not save voice recordings". What happens in this case is that your voice command is interpreted locally, on the device, and a text transcript of what you said is sent up to Amazon for analysis and response. At least this is what Amazon appears to say happens. I find it a little hard to believe that the cheap Echo devices can interpret and transcribe to text locally, but supposedly that is exactly what they do (optionally, if you say "Don't save voice recordings").

You can use the Alexa app to see the history of what you have done. By default, each entry shows what you asked/said, how Alexa responded, and includes a voice recording that you can listen to. Yes, you hear yourself speaking in the voice recording. In the case of "Do not save voice recordings" you will not have a voice recording to listen to - it's simply missing - but you can still READ what you said in the text transcript that is included in the entry. There is a setting in the Alexa app where you can tell it how long to save voice recordings. With the ultimate being "Do no save voice recordings at all". But even with this ultimate setting, Amazon still saves the text transcript. You can delete these saved transcripts manually, but it's a pain in the butt.

Alexa works just fine without being "trained" with your voice. But if you want, you can indeed train it. So if husband asked Alexa to "play my favorite playlist" it will play a different playlist than if wife said to "play my favorite playlist". This feature is called "Voice ID". Alexa not only recognizes what was said, she also recognizes who said it. This feature - the Voice ID - is what will stop working on March 28 if you do not allow Amazon to save voice recordings. In other words, after the 28th Alexa will only recognize what was said, but not who said it, UNLESS you allow Amazon to save voice recordings. In the past, if you tried to use a Voice ID feature with "Do not save voice recordings", it may or may not have worked. Usually "not". Amazon is changing that now, and instead of "may not work" it becomes "will not work". Evidently Alexa will no longer even try to match a voice to a person unless you allow Amazon to save recordings. In the past, Alexa would try ... but usually fail. So that's what's going to happen on the 28th. Nowhere near as big of a deal as some people are trying to make it.

Alexa has always sent things up over the internet. That's the only way Amazon can parse complex human language. Your privacy may indeed be compromised if Amazon saves voice recordings. But it is also compromised if Amazon saves text transcripts instead of voice recordings! Which they do! If this bothers you, do not use a voice assistant. And for that matter, do not use a smart TV, do not ride in a new car, or even allow guests into your house if they have smart phones with voice assistants (all smart phones do). All these things have the capability to record you and send a recording up to the internet. It doesn't even have to be in your house. Do not even casually speak to another person if that person has a smart phone on them. This pretty much means you cannot talk to anybody. But if you're going to ban voice assistant devices from your home because of privacy/security concerns, you are being a total hypocrite (or just ignorant) if you speak anywhere near someone with a smart phone in their pocket. Because that smart phone has a voice assistant in it, and you have no idea how the person you are talking to has configured it. They probably didn't even configure it at all - they just left it at default settings which are pretty much wide open. Chances are, they didn't even know you could configure it, or even worse - that it was even present on their smart phone in the first place.

One more thing to note - the Echo devices that implement Alexa have incredible hearing. I have six of them in my house, in different rooms, upstairs and downstairs. When we have an internet outage, and I will ask Alexa something in a normal quiet voice, all of these devices spread out over the house in different rooms and on different levels will start responding and saying the internet is out. Because the internet is how the group of them decide which one you were trying to talk to. I guess they compare the volume level they each heard to determine which one is the one you were trying to speak to. With no internet to allow this coordination, they all respond as individual entities. And the fact that just about the entire group responds during an internet outage shows you just how acute their hearing is.

One thing I would never do is hook up a security device to Alexa. You can actually get door locks that respond to Alexa voice control. That sounds really high tech, until somebody walks by your open front window and yells "Alexa, unlock front door". Yep, voice assistants can be a privacy/security nightmare. Unfortunately, you can't escape this nightmare simply by banning these devices from your home and then sitting there smugly saying "I'm good". You aren't. You are surrounded by listening devices throughout your day. Not just yours - other people's as well.