Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are designed to learn more about you as they listen, and part of doing so is to record conversations you’ve had with them so they can learn your tone of voice, prompts, and requests. While this is supposed to help the assistants learn to give you better answers, this feature-not-a-bug has landed Amazon in a string of bizarre headlines. In 2018, users reported that their Echo speakers began spontaneously laughing, while a family in Portland said their device recorded and sent conversations to a colleague without their knowledge. For these instances, Amazon claims that the devices were likely triggered by false positive commands.
Still, it’s not uncommon for smart speakers to pick…