Amazon Could Make This Big Privacy Change For Alexa Users That Will Worry Them
Amazon is finally entering the AI arena with the Alexa+ assistant this year but the company is expected to make some unpopular changes that will concern its users. Reports say Amazon will stop processing your voice recordings locally and send them to its cloud server for further actions.
The new AI-powered Alexa is reportedly the reason behind this big change as Amazon is making it run completely on the cloud. The option to run your personal conversations with Alexa via Echo speakers on-device was always the right way to keep the ecosystem working but the AI era means the company might not have a lot of choice but to end this support.
The New AI Concern
The report from Ars Technica quotes an email that select Echo users have got recently, which informs them about the changes and its plans to bring these into effect from end of this month. The report further states the mail was sent specifically to people who had enabled the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings" feature on their Echo speakers. Amazon’s obvious need to adopt AI means users will get new features and that comes at the cost of the local support for these recordings.
Tech giants like Google and Apple are going big on AI, even though the latter is facing challenges to make its AI work. But the need to keep the privacy aspect intact is critical and Amazon seems to be taking its stance based on the needs of the business rather than its users, at least going by what the report has mentioned.
We have not been able to verify these mails and did not get one from the company either to completely bang on about the subject but Amazon needs its AI to work and some tough decisions were going to be made. We are just hoping that the company thinks about its users and their current state before pulling the plug on such support.
The deadline for the new Alexa+ to be available is still a few weeks away and we hope to have more clarity on these changes before the new AI version rolls out for the users.