— This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on May 29, 2018, Tuesday.
That's right, the public started to worry about the privacy of private talk after the event that amazon echo recorded a private talk. Some instructional keywords maybe mentioned in this couple's talk and that was misidentified by Alexa, echo's voice assistant, Amazon said.
Amazon pointed out when trying to restore the event that there are words with similar pronunciation of "Alexa" in this couple's talk, and these words activated echo; then in the talk, "send message" appeared again, making Alexa ask "send to whom?", and the coincidence is someone's name was mentioned in the following talk, so Alexa identified that name as recipient and confirmed that name with user "Is this person?", later, this couple's talk was misunderstand as "right", so message was sent.
We also interviewed the chief editor of Tech Blog "Recode" regarding this problem. All smart devices have a similar operational system, which is being ready at any time to take action after searching related instructional words. Oregon's case shows the development of AI software has not reached the level that AI can match with people's daily life perfectly, he said.
[Ed Lee] "The technology just simply needs to get better. It needs to parse these differences, the way we parse these differences in everyday life, and I think that's the promise of voicing able competing, that's what Amazon, Google, Apple they are all sort of fighting to win that next platform, the way we want from desktop to mobile, now from mobile to voice. That's the thing they are all trying to fight, it's nowhere near that."
However, if this event is just "misread" and "wrongly send "of smart device, not "intentionally listen to" users, then the point causing the outside debate is amazon applied a patent in April, then Alexa is allowed to listen to users' talk and help the smart device to better understand users' likes. So this kind of "intentionally listening" arouses controversy among people: Under the background that the intelligentization and networking of home appliances have become a trend, how to choose between convenient life and privacy?
Currently, many companies are entering smart home market. In recent years, the maturity of mobile Internet technology boosts AI. However, users will gradually discover that their privacy is saved by various smart devices. For example, sleeping monitor "hello sense" records consumers' sleeping mode and information, Belkin's switch "WeMo" can reflect startup status of physical equipment in smart home, and indoors safety cam Nest Cam that under Google's parent company Alphabet records how long the user check the cam's feedback and how long the cam monitors movement.
So these various smart home appliances also arouse people's need of protecting privacy when they gradually integrate into people's life. John Scott Leyton, Senior Researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizenship Laboratory, said our attitude to the smart device may not change because of several cases as our society has already accepted the smart device, but people are also gradually accepting the fact that we are losing control over such things when we enjoy the convenience that created by the smart device. And this is indeed a big challenge.