Share on Social Media:

20,000 Devices Support Amazon’s Alexa

Amazon’s famous artificial intelligence (A I) platform has become a force in the consumer market. At last week’s IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin, Amazon announced that its Alexa app now works with more than 20,000 devices. This is an impressive advance, given that the firm said only last January that Alexa worked with 4,000 devices. A fivefold increase in eight months is almost unheard of for any product.

Image result for alexa images

Daniel Rausch, an Amazon executive, said, “Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”

20,000 Devices = Fivefold Increase in Eight Months

Rausch confirmed that Alexa works with more than 20,000 devices made by 3,500 manufacturers.

Amazon manufactures its own Alexa devices, including the Echo smart speakers,  Fire TV. and Fire tablets. But the company has been trying trying to get the app into as multiple third-party devices.

What is Alexa?

Alexa is an artificial intelligence, or machine learning, app. It works in phones, speakers, TV sets, thermostats, and even cars. At this year’s IFA conference, Netgear and Huawei announced that the app would be in their home routers. Amazon said it wants to bring the app into hotels and offices.

Alexa now has more than 50,000 skills. Hundreds of thousands of developers in 180 countries work with it. Many more are coming.

Rausch is especially proud of Alexa’s voice control functions. “It turned out that your smart phone is actually a pretty terrible remote control for your house,” he said. “You don’t want to fish around in your pocket, open applications, unlock your phone to control the device right in front of you. Voice has truly unlocked the smart home. That’s because its actually simpler.”

“You won’t need a manual”, Rausch said, “becasue our devices learn about you, not the other way around.”

What are Amazon’s competitors doing?

Alexa is not alone in its market. It competes with Apple’s Siri, Google’s Home Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Alexa is by far the most successful, though. Other providers are scrambling to replicate its market penetration, and likely will take years to catch up. Still, they are moving energetically to get their apps into laptops, phones, appliances- even vehicles.

Amazon seems unworried about its competitors. Its Echo smart speaker leads the voice assistant market by a wide margin. And Rausch says his company “has barely scratched the surface” of what voice control can do.

Getting into 20,000 devices in four years is an impressive feat. But for Amazon, evidently, it’s just the beginning.

(For the most reliable internet connection, shop with Satellite Country. Talk to us. We can help.)

Share on Social Media:

CONNECTED DEVICES & PRIVACY

Image result for cat dog conspiracy

Can you keep a secret? No, you can’t, at least not for long. With ever more of your electronic devices, appliances, utility meters, fitness trackers, and home security systems connected to the internet, it’s nearly certain that at least one of them will rat on you sooner or later.

Could Your Devices Be Subpoenaed?

Allison Berman, writing for Singularity Hub, warned that the connected devices in your home could be subpoenaed as witnesses against you. She cited a 2015 murder case, for which police asked Amazon to turn over cloud-based data sent by an Alexa-enabled Echo device in the home of James Andrew Bates, in whose hot tub detectives had found the body of his colleague, Victor Collins. On the night of the murder, the device had been used for streaming music. The Echo device, equipped with seven mikes, listens constantly for the ‘wake word’ that will activate it, making it receptive to commands. Just before and after sensing the wake word, Echo begins recording sound and transmitting it to Amazon’s cloud.

Police believe the Echo device may have recorded audio germane to their investigation.

In the near future, police may solve crimes by interrogating refrigerators, thermostats, TV sets, stereos, phones, tablets, and security systems. With multiple electronic witnesses, they can obtain fairly accurate and comprehensive pictures of the crimes, as they seek to do by interviewing multiple witnesses to an auto accident.

Privacy laws regarding connected devices are very weak. Because the information is stored in the cloud, the owner or user of the devices doesn’t own the data they transmit. It’s not protected to the same degree that documents in his house are.

Could Your Connected Devices Be Hacked?

Of course, any connected device can be hacked. If Alexa is hacked, could a hostile party listen to everything you say in your home? And if you have twenty connected devices in your home, a hacker might obtain eerily accurate and complete information about what you do all day. Could he use it to blackmail you? What could a stalker do if he knows where you’ll be, when, and for what reason?

Hackers could also hijack your devices to spread false information about you. Patrick Frey, who blogs as ‘Patterico’, suffered a ’SWATting’ attack in 2011 after a hacker ‘spoofed’ his cellphone number to place a midnight 911 call. Pretending to be Frey, the caller said he had shot his wife.

Sheriff’s deputies pounded on Frey’s door and rang his doorbell. When he opened the door, they pointed their guns at him and told him to put his hands up. The deputies handcuffed Frey and placed him in a squad car. Then they awakened his wife, led her downstairs, and frisked her. After ascertaining that the children were safe, the police finally left.

The incident could easily have cost Frey his life. Cops are likely to be nervous in confronting a man they believe to be armed and to have just committed a murder.

Can You Trust Browsers and Social Media?

Loss of privacy need not require either hacking or law enforcement inquiry. Certain browsers, such as Google, and social media, such as Facebook, offer overly complicated terms of service– as long as 30,000 words. Few, if any, users read them. The rules are nearly inscrutable for a reason. They’re meant to protect providers from liability, not to protect your privacy.

Since you don’t pay for Google and Facebook services, you are their product. They earn their money through sale of advertising, so they want as much data about you as possible. Their advertisers demand it.

Two years ago, Facebook faced a media firestorm after the discovery that it had been manipulating the emotional states of thousands of users. Facebook had learned that the emotional impact of the images it showed users would affect the character of their posts. With this information, it could reinforce advertising messages.

You reveal far more through social media than you’d guess. MIT’s ‘Gaydar’ project confirmed that one could reliably infer that a particular subject was gay, based solely on his social media posts, even if he had never admitted it openly, and even if he was trying strenuously to keep it hidden. Another MIT project, called ‘Psychopath’, tracked social media posts to determine presence or absence of schizophrenia.

Can You Trust Your Smart TV Set?

On Monday, February 6, Vizio settled a lawsuit over claims that it had violated consumer privacy. The plaintiffs had alleged that Vizio’s connected ‘smart’ TV sets had been tracking ‘second by second’ data about customer viewing habits. To this, Vizio had allegedly added specific demographic information: age, sex, marital status, size of household, income, home ownership, and household value. The company is alleged to have sold this information to third parties. The third parties would use it to enable targeted advertising.

LG and Samsung have also been accused of collecting viewer data through their connected TV sets.

What Can You Do?

What can you do to protect yourself? Update your passwords often. Encrypt what you can. Always stay aware of when your connected devices are switched on.

It may help to assume that everything you do will become public- and live accordingly.

(For the most reliable connection, talk to us. We can help.)