I hear @benrules2 about Alexa enabling us to not be tied to a screen. In fact, these devices do help kids get off the couch and encourage fun family interaction. Yet, parents should be aware of the devices’ recording and storage capabilities, which I detail in this post: durablehuman.com/dont-be-dumb-about-smart-toys-and-home-devices-by-google-home-and-amazon-alexa/
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Hi @Free, thanks for the comment and suggestions here. Because I am participating in a personal capacity here though, I’m afraid I can’t relay any feature suggestions or comment on them.
Hi @benrules2! Very nice to have you participate in our community.
It is indeed true that privacy is increasingly concerning for more and more people, as they become aware of the data collection practices at play, how that data is used, aggregated and traded, and the implications that can have for them personally (implications that will only increase).
There is a continuous debate about what data devices like the Echo, and similar ones from other vendors, are collecting, or could be collecting in the future, without their users being aware of that. Only yesterday there was such a discussion on Hacker News (in NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case). I guess in future the speech-to-text transformation could be performed on the device, and in theory that allows continuous data collection.
Not saying Amazon is in that business, of course. And it would not be smart, given the blowback, if that would ever come out.
I am privacy-aware myself, and dread the time where I’d have to ask friends and family to please switch off their listening devices, when I am visiting them (“There you have that tinfoil hat guy again.”). And I’m living in a democracy, not an authoritarian state.
Regarding Amazon business plan being not all that hard to understand - being in Shopping - I don’t agree, and I am surprised you did describe it as such…
Amazon is in numerous markets already. Its business model is about entering about every branch you can imagine and Amazon is also not shy to proclaim that.
They are going from business branch to business branch with the intent to conquer and rule supreme. With great success so far. And they use dominant positions in one branch to reinforce others - no firewalls, lik in Banking, and can afford to enter new markets at very low price points (and initially great loss) to undercut the competition.
Also I don’t think they are outside the “attention economy”. If only for shopping, you need the eyeballs on the products in your shop for the longest time possible. But Amazon is also very ambitious to enter the Online Advertising market and want to become a dominant player in 2019 (see e.g. How Amazon Is Priming Its Advertising Business for 2019).
With all of this Amazon is fully partaking in the ‘Data is the new Gold’ era, just like any other Big Tech giant, and plays a big role in the same moral and ethical issues that surround their business practices towards users, customers and employees.
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An article by Darren Austin published on Nir Eyal’s (writer of “Hooked”) website about how Alexa hooks us:
The Hook Model, which cycles through the Trigger, Action, Reward, and Investment phases explains how Alexa changed our habits and keeps us hooked.
PS, A different write-up of this article can be found on LinkedIn here
I never used a hardware voice assistant device before, but I did some research on the general voice assistants market not long ago, and since the last reply a year has passed, and I am quite shocked by how fast the voice assistant technology has developed.
The war between big tech companies is highly competitive. Google’s Duplex technology aims at entering B2B space (where Google Assistant tries to help merchants handle customer phone calls for simple tasks like making appointments), while Amazon keeps pushing out new products based on Alexa. Microsoft is working on Cortana utilising its huge enterprise client base. It seems that only Apple now hasn’t made significant progress on Siri.
The privacy issue indeed is worrying, and when crimes and other complicated issues get involved, it becomes trickier. It basically circles back to the data exploitation issue, where although as consumers we may get some convenience and benefits, there’s a certain price we need to pay, and there is lack of transparency to us.
I can imagine voice assistants to be useful in cases when people are driving, cooking etc. However, personally speaking, I don’t feel any need to buy a physical device that comes with a voice assistant. Another point that kind of intrigues me is that Google is trying to make Google Assistant sound just like a real human (you can hear some recordings of their Duplex talking to a customer who wants to make an appointment here). Is humanising tech really necessary? What kind of world will we live in when the technology around us is designed that way?
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I think it’s the same purpose of reducing friction while implementing interfaces and apps, in order to make the use of this technology more and more natural and addictive.
Yes, I agree that can be one reason. We tend to have more trust when what we see and what we hear are natural (like humans). This kind of explains when people accuse of each other on the Internet, they sometimes forget that behind the screen on the other side is a real human capable of feeling different emotions just like themselves. The text and website limit the natural conversational environment like what we normally have in real life.
I am concerned when people put too much trust in humanised technology. As the boundary becomes blurred, it may lead to unintended consequences. And when we are irrational, it’s hard to look at what is truly happening behind the scene that gets hidden from us.
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Yeah I agree. I think people should not rely entirely on technologies. When the person is alone or feeling depressed they find someone with whom they can share their feelings with and this kind of devices becomes their support or the thing whom they can share things with. I know that these devices don’t have any kind of feelings but it’s a human nature that if they are alone, sad or depressed they really need someone to share their feelings with and this device is mostly becoming the person for that lonely, sad or depressed individual to share their feelings with.
I believe people should use technology but don’t get addicted to them, technology is only designed/developed to make things easier for Humans not for share feelings/emotions with.
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