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Amazon's Alexa Is Coming To an Office Near You (axios.com)
Amazon announced today that it's bringing its voice assistant into a range of business settings, big and small, like hotels and co-working spaces. From a report: While people always think of Amazon as a consumer company, it has shown itself time and again to have larger ambitions. This move could help it expand tis business services beyond its already popular Amazon Web services. In an interview, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said that exposure to the workplace will improve Alexa by exposing it to new types of conversations. "The kind of language we use in our offices is sometimes radically different from the more conversational things we do in our(homes)," he told Axios. Alexa "will greatly improve by being exposed to different kinds of statements or conversations."
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER*
down with big brother
down with big brother
down with big brother
down with big brother
down with big brother
down with big brother
down with big brother
* and the only reason they all aren't "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" is that BB, in this case /., won't allow it!
Google, Amazon, Apple are all missing the point.
Technologies like this are fantastic, but only if you can wall them off from the outside world, at least as far as sending information goes.
Put it all on a chip, provide incoming links only, and robust protection against injection type attacks. So, no sending info out, and no using outside info to affect inside systems.
Tough nut to crack, I know. But that's the ticket!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
First the business case doesn't exist. It's not needed or desired. Not to mention the boat loads of industry that just can't have something like this in their office at all. Financial industry, attorneys, medical, government. There I just ruled out 80% of the workforce.
Hotel lobby,maybe, and only as a novelty, but no place else in the hotel. And for what actual purpose would you use this spyware device?
We got an Amazon Echo at work to see if it's any use for business activities as it stands. First problem was that there's no way to configure a proxy server to gain access to Amazon (and other) remote servers, which is incredibly short-sighted of them.
Second issue is that an "obvious" business use is recording (and preferably transcribing) business meetings, but I was *shocked* that the Echo can't even take a simple voice note and record it for you for later access (never mind transcribing to text, which would be another essential feature).
As everyone has been pointing out here, everything the Echo does seems to go through Amazon's servers, so business confidentiality seems to be a major stumbling block to business acceptance. Heck, I can't even tell if the data goes out encrypted (without sniffing the network traffic) and is always stored encrypted.