In recent times Amazon launched three models of his family with an interesting option that yes, was only available in the US and in English: local processing of voice recordings. That prevented users from They had to send those recordings to the Amazon cloud and supposed an interesting improvement in privacy. That option will soon stop being available.
Less privacy. The products that allowed this feature, explain In The Vergeit was the Echo Dot (4th generation), echo show 10, and echo show 15. As of March 28, those devices of the Amazon Echo family will stop being able to process the audio locally on the device itself. Thus, all audio clips will end up transferred to their servers to be processed in their cloud infrastructure.
AI as an excuse. In Ars Technica They indicate how Amazon has explained in an email to this publication that the change is due to the new use of AI models in Alexa+. Specifically, they assure,
By continuing to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative functions that depend on the processing power of the safe cloud of Amazon, we have decided to stop supporting this function.
Alexa+ in sight. After this decision is the launch of Alexa+the new version of this voice assistant that will now be enhanced by AI models. To process these models, however, the power of the Amazon cloud is needed, which according to the company makes it impossible for requests to be processed at home as happened so far.
Voice recognition. The new AI system that will govern these devices will also have more advanced options to recognize the voice of who is using it and thus be able to respond more precisely and contextually, something that the company calls Voice ID. This characteristic forces Amazon to eliminate the privacy function that was present before, although very limitedly: it is likely that many users of these models did not even know that such privacy characteristic was available.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to in your echo. Users of these devices will not be able to avoid this sending of audio clips even if Alexa+will not use: Amazon will also send those audios even if they do not use said service with ia. The Alexa+ service based on AI models will be included in the Amazon Prime subscription.
Another condemnation for privacy. Apart from that special option, the Amazon Echo family devices allow to control certain privacy options like him time that the recordings were stored If they reach their servers.
Controversies of the past. In April 2019 it was revealed how Amazon employees listened recordings with the excuse of improving the service. That made The controversy will jump And in fact they already had problems with the suspicion about privacy When Alexa began to be available in Spanish.
Amazon promises to protect that data. In that email to Ars Technica Amazon also assured that “Alexa’s voice requests are always sent to the Amazon security cloud, which was designed with security protection layers to keep customer information safe.” They also point out that there will still be various controls to refine that way of managing user data.
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