Author: Kathy Reid, PhD Candidate, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University

Amazon has disabled two key privacy features in its Alexa smart speakers, in a push to introduce artificial intelligence-powered “agentic capabilities” and turn a profit from the popular devices. Starting today (March 28), Alexa devices will send all audio recordings to the cloud for processing, and choosing not to save these recordings will disable personalisation features. How do voice assistants work? A voice assistant works by constantly listening for a “wake word”, such as “Alexa”. Once woken, it records the command that is spoken and matches it to an action, such as playing a music track. Matching a spoken command…