IOT: Voice Assistants

“We live in a techno-dystopia of our own making. If you still have an Alexa or any other voice assistant in your home, you were warned,” wrote the Gizmodo writer Matt Novak.

“You are building an infrastructure that can be later co-opted in undesirable ways by large multinationals and state surveillance apparatus, and compromised by malicious hackers,” says Dr Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at UCL Faculty of Laws at University College London.

Over the past six months, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Vice News and the Belgian news channel VRT have gradually revealed that all the big five have been using human contractors to analyse a small percentage of voice-assistant recordings. Although the recordings are anonymised, they often contain enough information to identify or embarrass the user – particularly if what they overhear is confidential medical information or an inadvertent sex tape. The revelations were the last straw for many Alexa sceptics.

Voice control first seized the public imagination in the 60s, via HAL 9000, the sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Starship Enterprise’s endlessly helpful computer in Star Trek. The latter was a major reference point for the teams that developed Amazon’s Echo and the Google Assistant. “The bright light, the shining light, that is still many years away, many decades away, is to recreate the Star Trek computer,” Limp told a conference audience in 2017.