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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."
In countries where employees have some privacy rights, this could expose employers to legal risks.
Any hotel using this will drive my business elsewhere.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What would be the rationale for putting Alexia into any business that would justify initial purchase and deployment costs? What about control of proprietary information? What about control of legally sensitive information?
As terrible as Lotus was at user interfaces, Lotus Notes had strong message encryption, digital signatures, and two-factor authentication as standard features all the way back in 1989. As such it was actually ahead of what most people have today.
The main problem was that you couldn't find administrators who understood any of that shit back in 1990.
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As an InfoSec guy, there is NO WAY IN HELL any of these type of devices are getting into my building.
In fact, I think our next infosec newsletter will mention keeping these away from work-from-home spaces, as well