Alexa May Be Listening without Wake Words

If you own an Alexa device, you’ve probably heard the digital assistant say something seemingly out of nowhere. Usually, that’s because the system detected some speech that sounded a bit like an Echo wake word but wasn’t. Some of these recordings are sent over to Amazon’s human improvement teams.

This means that humans could be listening to snippets of conversations you have that don’t involve Alexa. Of course, the primary goal of this type of annotation is to make Alexa respond to false positives less. But it could still mean Amazon is listening to things you don’t necessarily want it to.