Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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>> "Hey, we know you tried to ask your Echo to report its volume level before and it didn't work

This makes me shudder. Such a functionality would mean that they stored your failed request in some sort of database, a database that they later used to send you a personalized marketing email. A machine cataloging our voice for later inspection is a very dark future. Alexa should delete and scrub any iota of voice that it doesn't instantly understand.

"Oh, remember last week when I though you were asking me to buy you a pot plant? I now realize you were asking me to buy you some pot from Canada. It will be arriving in two days."

"I didn't understand it at the time, but I now realize that you were yelling at your husband Alex, not Alexa. Your social credit score has been adjusted to reflect this negative interaction."

They are 100% storing everything and so is google. You can actually go to google and replay all the recordings they have saved of you.

You can also replay the audio from all your Alexa commands in the app. In iOS it’s in Settings -> Alexa Account -> History.

Some of the recordings are unintentionally hilarious though, it turns out. When I looked at the history page, there were a bunch of times when Google seemed to think I was saying "b b b b b b b b b" repeatedly? Anyway, when I played the audio back, it seems my alarm clock's beeping had triggered the Google Assistant, which then obviously failed to understand the beeps!

> Such a functionality would mean that they stored your failed request in some sort of database, a database that they later used to send you a personalized marketing email.

I don't think this kind of thing would need (or even benefit from) actual voice recordings when it comes to the "new functionality" part of things. I would expect something more like a running tally of the X most common failed interactions after running the transcript through a fuzzy-match filter, and a long list of accounts associated with each.

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