I mean, is this really news? We know that Amazon records the clips of what you say to Alexa for the purposes of improving the recognition. Everything after you say "Alexa..."
How would they tell whether their models are right or wrong without listening and having someone compare?
I see nothing in this article to suggest the clips they're listening to are related to an always-on microphone.
That's probably one of the only competitive advantages of Bixby. That's likely not going to get misheard very often. Though I guess "OK Google" is probably hard to mishear, too.
The first thing I do when I set up a smart speaker is turn on the accessibility option that chimes when it's listening so I can tell when the mic is active.
Coincidentally, this is how my wife discovered and fixed a filler word habit of "Ok, good, well..."
As someone who works in digital marketing and SEO, I can't tell you how many times my google assistant thinks I'm talking to it during the course of my day. I really wish they would let me change the wake word.
True, I imagine its false positive rate is higher than Bixby's. But I think the specific combination of "o-kay-goo-gull" probably doesn't clash with too many things; even when talking about Google. But my Alexa seems to pick up all sorts of words vaguely sounding like Alexa when I play videos.
So I’m sitting in my office, talking with a colleague…
“OK, Google patent 9,876,543 and see if we’re infringing.”
or if my colleague is named Alexa…
“Alexa, let’s hammer those idiots.”
I think the first would wake Google Home. I guess Alexa lets you change the wake word to ‘echo’ or ‘computer’. It would be better if it let you use something arbitrary like ‘Rumplestiltskin’
IP leakage or potential misunderstandings don’t seem so improbable to me. Especially if the listeners in (from OP Bloomberg article) in Costa Rica, India, or Romania aren’t au courant with “hammer those idiots” as English idiom in context.
I use the word google a lot in other contexts simply because they are a big company with lots of services, and they happen to make the (tech) news quite often. So only the word OK would have to be misheard. Bixby seems safer in this regard.
They should not save recordings by default. They only should save recordings of people who opted-in to be a beta tester or people who spotted a bug and want to send a bug report. But companies instead make every user a guinea pig by default and try not to disclose it clearly hoping the user won't realise it.
It is interesting that while there are several manufacturers, all of them opt-in users as testers by default, no matter what product you choose. So maybe such market needs a little stricter regulation.
One major issue that you're glossing over is that Alexa is easily triggered, even when no one explicitly says "Alexa". So audio clips of private conversations are being sent to Amazon.
For an example of accidental triggering, look up news on "Alexa creepy laughter".
How would they tell whether their models are right or wrong without listening and having someone compare?
I see nothing in this article to suggest the clips they're listening to are related to an always-on microphone.