Command "Alexa, send a message to (enter contact name)" and Amazon's smart assistant will follow your instructions. But, imagine Alexa listening to you secretly while you talk with your wife, record that conversation and then send it to some random person who is your contact list. Creepy and tough to imagine something like this will happen. But it happened to a couple in Portland where an Echo Dot smart speaker, powered by Alexa, reportedly secretly recorded a private conversation between a husband and wife and sent it to the man's colleague.
Hours after the report came out, Amazon acknowledged that was a sort of glitch with this particular Echo Dot speaker and that Alexa misunderstood the conversation as a command.
Instances like this aren't new. Back in March this year, Alexa was in news after it made random creepy laughs. Then too it misunderstood some words or phrases as "Alexa, laugh" command. In this new incident, a woman identified as Danielle from Portland narrated the entire incident that she and her husband faced with Alexa in an interview with Kiro 7, a local TV station.
Danielle said that her Amazon Echo Dot secretly recorded a private conversation between her and her husband. Not only that, Alexa then sent the recorded conversation to a colleague of the husband all the way to Seattle, who then called and asked her to immediately unplug all the Echo speakers in the house. Soon after the incident took place, Danielle contacted Amazon for a clarification on why this had happened.
Later in a statement to The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed the incident and said that it happened because Amazon misunderstood conversations as a command. The spokesperson goes on say that this is no incident of Alexa spying on users. According to Amazon spokesperson, the Echo Dot woke up due to a word in background conversation which sounded like Alexa.
"Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a 'send message' request. At which point, Alexa said out loud 'To whom?' At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, '[contact name], right?' Alexa then interpreted background conversation as 'right'. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely," said the spokesperson. However, in contrary, Danille says that the Echo Dot didn't give any indication or signal that it was recording or sending the message.
In a statement to Kiro 7 TV, another Amazon spokesperson said, "Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
