Is Amazon’s Alexa listening to me all the time?

Alexa sent private conversation to random
contact, but retail giant says an ‘unlikely string of events’ led
to the mysterious incident

One-Minute Read

The couple had fitted “every room” in their home with devices
powered by the voice assistant and had joked that they were
listening in to their conversations. 

But the joke came to a swift end after the couple received a
phone call from a friend in Seattle, who told them they were “being
hacked” and that they should “unplug your Alexa devices right now”, Kiro7 reports. 

Danille, who didn’t reveal her surname, said: “we
unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had
received audio files of recordings from inside our
house”.

Responding to the mysterious incident, Amazon told The Verge that the couple’s voice assistant
seems to have overheard the conversation in a different room and
misinterpreted some of the words as commands. 

“As unlikely as this string of events is, we are
evaluating options to make this case even less likely”, the retail
giant said.

Still, it does little to ease fears that Amazon’s voice
assistant may be snooping on a user’s private
discussion. 

Is Alexa listening all the time?

The short answer is no. According to Tech World, Alexa will only listen and record
conversations after “wake word” has been spoken, and anything you
then say can be deleted from the device’s history. 

But those who do not want Alexa to listen to them at all can
press and hold the microphone button on top of their Echo speaker
until it turns red.

Regardless of whether the light is red or blue, though,
Amazon has always insisted that its speakers do not snoop on user
conversations, but when they do it’s often attributed to some form
of technical glitch. 

For instance, the retail giant issued a fix for its Echo
smart speakers after it was found a software bug had caused the
voice assistant to continuously listen to its surroundings last
month, The Daily Telegraph says, even when the “Alexa”
wake command had not been issued. 

Addint to the concerns, Alexa-powered speakers also spooked a
number of Echo owners in March, after users reported hearing
spontaneous “creepy” laughter from their
devices.