Amazon Says It's Studying How to Reduce Likelihood of Inadvertent Echo Recordings

Amazon is “evaluating options to make this case even less likely,” a company spokeswoman emailed us Thursday, after widely published reports that an Echo smart speaker recorded a conversation and sent it to a person in a user’s contact list. “Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa,’” the spokeswoman said, in response to our question how the snafu occurred. “Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’” she told us. The background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list, she said. “Alexa then asked out loud, '[contact name], right?'” Alexa interpreted background conversation as “right,” she said. “As unlikely as this string of events is,” said the spokeswoman, Amazon is looking at ways to make it less likely to occur.