digital assistant

The name for an automated, voice-activated service, usually on your smartphone (such as Siri) or as a smart home device (such as Alexa). Digital assistants can perform tasks on behalf of an individual with the help of certain user inputs and access to GPS location. These tasks include accessing the weather, stock prices, traffic conditions, schedules, news, etc., or to operate certain functions around the home such as turning off lights.

Historical perspective: By 2017, companies are already trying to figure out how to market to these machines. In 2019, it was revealed that Amazon employs thousands of people who listen to voice recordings captured by its Echo speakers, said Bloomberg.com. That means anytime you ask “Alexa” for something, a live human might listen to your request! The recordings are transcribed, annotated, and then fed back into the software to help improve Alexa’s speech recognition. But it raises privacy and ethical questions, listen to Geoffrey Fowler's story in The Washington Post:

“I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life." Many people don’t realize it, “but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name”—and you can listen to the archive. For me, that included a lot of “spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests, and snippets of Downton Abbey.” But there was also more sensitive material, like my family discussing medication. I also found dozens of times when my Alexa “recorded without a legitimate prompt.” Apple and Google also keep recordings from their smart home devices. Amazon does let you delete your recording history, and Google’s Assistant can be set not to store recordings. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t give you the ability to review what it has kept—or the option not to store recordings.