‘Alexa, can I trust you with this?’: New generation of Amazon AI and Alexa+ will see all commands sent to the cloud

There have long been concerns that voice-enabled assistants such as Amazon’s Echo and Dot and Google’s Home speaker are allowing the mega tech corporations to have more access to our lives than we may want them to.

While a large chunk of commands to Alexa are no doubt merely asking whether it’s going to rain, asking for a certain radio station to be played, or made by over-excitable five-year-olds discovering juvenile music tracks (”Alexa, play Fart in my Butt), the fact that a listening speaker sits in millions of households around the world is, when looked at from the most worried of angles, the stuff of dystopia. OK, it’s not the government snooping on your life but it’s huge companies who want to make as much money out of you as they can - which is arguably much worse.

And now, Amazon has revealed that it is making changes at the end of the month, meaning there is nowhere to hide. The Alexa privacy settings will change on March 28, as part of the Alexa+ enhanced generative AI-based voice assistant.

This does, however, only affect US users who have set their machines to English. Those people who have a fourth-generation Echo Dot, an Echo Show10 or an Echo Show 15. They were able to choose “local processing” for Alexa requests, meaning that the commands were not sent to the Amazon cloud. This feature will now be turned off, so everything will be directed to Amazon’s servers.

Amazon says there are still safeguards being built in, and that users can configure Alexa to automatically delete voice recordings immediately after processing, ensuring no long-term storage of their audio commands, as well as the manual deletion option, which can be done through the Alexa app or the Alexa Privacy Dashboard.

However, Amazon’s previously possibly cavalier attitude to data may strike a worrying note. As the website Ars Technica puts it: “In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25m in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination toward keeping Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out.”

And if you do start deleting the recordings that Alexa makes, you will find that the Voice ID feature - which enables Alexas to give personalised services to people in the same household - will not work.

Alexa+ is said to offer a more conversational, context-aware version of Alexa. It was announced last month at Amazon’s devices and services event. It will at first only be available in the US, and there has not been any date given for when it may be rolled out elsewhere. In America Alexa+ will cost $19.99 per month, but be free for all Prime members.

At the February event Amazon said it would start with “households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21”. It has previously said that the free version of Alexa will be continued.