What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard

Summary

She is always listening. She is unfailingly polite. She is often obtuse. She is sometimes helpful. She frequently frustrates. She isn’t great with bashment artists. Or grime. Or drum’n’bass. She needs to be spoken to slowly and clearly, as you’d talk to an aged relative with diminished faculties. She doesn’t like French accents.‘“Alexa, how long do wasps live for?”“Alexa, how long do wasps live if you hit them with a tea towel and then a saucepan?”In September 2016, a new presence appears in our house, squatting on the kitchen counter between the kettle and the coffee machine. It is blandly futuristic, a minimal cylinder with an LED ring that glows blue to alert us to the fact that it is ready, poised to answer our questions or carry out our instructions, as long as those instructions are clearly stated and fall within a narrow band of available “skills”.More often than I’d like, the solid blue glow is replaced by a rotating wash of green to tell us that an Amazon order is on its way. Occasionally, the light is red: this happens when someone has turned off the microphone to seize control of the device and impose their music on all of us. Our Amazon Echo is primarily used as the family Bluetooth speaker, and a glance through the music played on it demonstrates that there is very little common ground between our differing tastes. In a household with three young people, the kitchen is a place of musical education and dispute, with the Echo the communal weapon of choice.Our Echo is one of the early ones: essentially a smart speaker connected to a server where the fairly rudimentary Alexa voice assistant attempts to turn our requests and questions into actions and answers. More recent incarnations have screens that allow you to make video calls or stream TV programmes, inevitably, through Amazon Prime. And, when Amazon releases its long-awaited, generative AI-enabled update in the next few weeks or months, my aged unit will be incompatible with Alexa+. It won’t remember ...