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Amazon Patents New Alexa Feature That Knows When You're ill and Offers To Sell You Medicine (telegraph.co.uk)
Amazon has patented a new version of its virtual assistant Alexa which can automatically detect when you're ill and offer to sell you medicine. From a report: The proposed feature would analyse speech and identify other signs of illness or emotion. One example given in the patent is a woman coughing and sniffling while she speaks to her Amazon Echo device. Alexa first suggests some chicken soup to cure her cold, and then offers to order cough drops on Amazon. If Amazon were to introduce this technology, it could compete with a service planned by the NHS. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said earlier this year that the NHS was working on making information from its NHS Choices online service available through Alexa. Amazon's system, however, doesn't need to ask people whether they're ill -- it would just know automatically by analyzing their speech. Adverts for sore throat products could be automatically played to people who sound like they have a sore throat, Amazon's patent suggests.
I's prefer if Alexa phone my boss to tell him I can't come in for a couple of days for national health reasons.
Faux AI for business automation is great and smart.
Faux AI for consumers is creepy, especially faux AI that feeds live audio back to the NSA.
So Alexa is now a drug dealer? What's next? Pimp daddy?
Really people, do we need this obvious capitslist BS. Its an interesting science fair project, but if you don't have the insight to know when you need some chicken soup, then you deserve to suffer your malady . Wake up people, you will always be smarter than the technology in your hand.
That does require an earlier detection though. Wheezing when you come in the door as a sign of a hart-attack to come? (Ahahahaha, I got prior art now!)
This stuff is getting utterly creepy. And the idea is so obvious, the only thing they should be getting for the patent application is a hefty fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Alexa is very, very stupid. Are you going to pu your health in her hands?
Dopesick motherfuckers. Dopesick.
Cue the condom ads.
"It sounds like you injured your foot kicking me around. Would you like to order some pain medication?"
Table-ized A.I.
This sounds just awful. Alexa is going to pimp cough drops to me all day long, despite the fact that I already have two bags of them sitting in the cabinet? Or the fact that I've already got a case of chicken soup in the pantry? If I'm vegan, is Alexa still going to pimp the chicken soup, or is it going to push some BS homeopathic remedy instead? I just don't get paying large sums of money to get a device that just peppers me with ads.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
What could possibly go wrong? Amazon must have some high aspirations for improving their "AI". More likely, people with more money than sense would discard their own judgement in favor of the whims of a non-sentient corporation and end up sending more money to Big Pharma and further their own demise. Hmm, now that I think of it, that might not be all bad...
The following statement is true: The previous statement is false.
And this is why I'll never allow one of these fucking digital assistants into my house.
Alexa was always going to be about tracking you, showing you ads and selling you shit. No thanks, Amazon can fuck off.
Sorry, no, I'm not having something like this shit in my house which is going to report every fucking aspect of my life to assholes like Amazon. Not now, not ever.
Shit like this should be illegal.
Fuck you, Bezos, you pointless sack of shit. 'One click' this you goat fucker.
should not be patentable especially those that violate privacy. (Only realizations of methods and algorithms.)
*facepalm*
It sees you when you're sleeping
It knows when you're awake
It knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
Is the new "with a computer" of the 90s. Soon to be "with neural network".
They can patent an idea. They can patent any way to do an asttract thing.. recognize sniffles...that's the real story here. Creating a wall of litigation that tskes tens of millions of dollars can even challenge.
This is the regulatory state being captured by Bezeos and Google and patent lswyers . This is the opposite of a free market.
Can it detect when I'm frustrated with the Echo and offer to sell me a hammer?
This is not a good thing. Having a corporate spy in your home reporting on you is not a good thing.
It is also a government spy, if they want it to be. Which is also a bad thing.
Google/Amazon and the rest need to be put in their place.
The water in the pot is actually getting warmer and yes, your personal freedom is at risk.
So, if Alexa now knows when I'm ill... does that mean it has a moral obligation to do something about it?
Does this mean Alexa will classify as a medical device and be stuck in FDA approval limbo for ages?
Also, can we 86 this chicken soup cure for the cold? Most of the soups have an obnoxious sodium content that just wreaks havoc on your already weakened digestive system.
Does it also recommend leeches?
Security? Yea, this is West Gate. We've got an Amazon package here that says "Auto-ordered by Alexa" to be delivered to Oval Office. It has a bottle of something called Aricept. Can you come get it? Thanks.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
#WalkAwayFromTheseOrwellianFuckers
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And the day when Alexa has someone buy a cough medicine to which they are allergic. Enter anaphylcatic shock and death. Who pays?
This will happen because people will take the "AI" suggestion as safe and not consider the contents of the medicine.
It's not like we're dangerously over-medicated already or anything. And they certainly won't recommend additional products to deal with the side effects of the medication. Nope, no problems here, just take your medicine...
*vomit*vomit*
Alexa isnâ(TM)t and will never be a medical practitioner, so it should never have been an option to pretend to be one.
"I see that you writing a suicide note, would like some sleeping pills and whiskey?"
prior art exists - cellphones listen for brand names and substitute advertising in browser when it hears an M.D. Rx prescription. I don't know how its driven by adwords or mfgr, but we are about to find out
"someone needs a haircut!"
"you look like you could use a hug"
"time to lose some weight, tubby"
"looks like someone's been hitting the bottle again"
etc
Alexa, go get another 12 pack! This is an EMERGENCY!!
Wheezing when you come in the door as a sign of a hart-attack to come?
This happens to me all the time. Open door, crawl in gasping for breath, "must watch My Drunk Kitchen, must (gasp) log in ... need to ...".
That is all.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Serving ads for soup may be acceptable, if really annoying for the end user.
Linking a medicine with any sort of diagnosis would immediately come under a raft of legislation in many countries. Only qualified physicians or other healthcare professionals are able to do this legally as far as I know...