Alexa

From IndieWeb


Alexa is the trigger word or name for the Amazon Echo service and smart speaker.

IndieWeb Examples

No known IndieWeb related examples, e.g. using Alexa to control or browser your personal site perhaps.

Criticism

training using real conversations

  • 2023-09-26 NBC News: Amazon will use real user conversations to train Alexa's AI model / The disclosure that Amazon would train its AI from real user conversations came in a Bloomberg TV interview.

    Amazon announced new AI capabilities for its Alexa products last week, based on a model it’s calling AlexaLLM (LLM refers to the “large language model”). The technology will make Alexa “more personalized to your family” and allow it to remember relevant context throughout conversations like a human, Amazon said.

    But along with those new capabilities, said Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, Dave Limp, Amazon would use some user voice interactions with Alexa to train its AI model.

Allegations of violating children’s privacy law

According to a complaint filed in May by the DOJ on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years and used it for its own purposes “while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.”

See also