Amazon has disabled two key privacy features in its Alexa smart speakers, in a push to introduce artificial intelligence-powered "agentic capabilities" and turn a profit from the popular devices. Starting from March 28, Alexa devices now send all audio recordings to the cloud for processing, and choosing not to save these recordings will disable personalisation features. A voice assistant works by constantly listening for a "wake word", such as "Alexa". Once woken, it records the command that is spoken and matches it to an action, such as playing a music track. Matching a spoken command to an action requires what computer scientists call natural language understanding, which can take a lot of computer power. Matching commands to actions can be done locally (on the device itself), or sound recordings can be uploaded to the cloud for processing.

But if you have an Amazon Echo, there's bad news for you - as Amazon is about to controversially kill a popular privacy feature. Until now, some Amazon Echo devices have had the option to process commands locally'on-device', keeping your voice within the confines of your home. But from March 28, all Alexa-powered Echo smart speakers will send your voice recordings to the cloud, whether you like it or not. Cory Doctorow, a blogger and expert on digital rights management, called it'absolutely unforgivable' because it will let Amazon workers snoop on all Echo recordings. Amazon has already received criticism for storing conversations users have with Alexa, which have been listened to and transcribed by staff, it admitted in 2019.

After more than a year out of sight, Alexa –the new Alexa with its AI-powered revamp–took center stage at a crowded coming-out party in New York City on Wednesday, and I got a first-hand look at what this turbocharged voice assistant can do. Following the big unveiling, we were all led to a demonstration hall with about a half-dozen break-out rooms, where we were able to see and hear--but not participate in--Alexa's new conversational tricks, from controlling smart home devices and researching sports tickets to suggesting recipes and dialing up tunes on Amazon Prime Video. If all that sounds like old hat, consider this: While the old Alexa requires falling back into what Amazon devices head Panos Panay rightfully described as "Alexa-speak," the new Alexa is a far more flexible and understanding companion, capable of sussing out your intentions from the vaguest of queries, and--at least, from what I saw on Wednesday--getting it right more than it failed. While the demonstrations we saw appeared carefully choreographed, we were frequently assured that what we were seeing and hearing was the "live" Alexa, rather than a canned demo--and from someone who's spent a fair amount of time with ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, the exchanges sounded genuine. Here are my biggest takeaways after sitting through Amazon's Alexa show-and-tell, starting with… Naturally, everyone's waiting for the new AI-powered Alexa to bungle a command or start hallucinating, but the demos I saw on Wednesday went surprisingly smoothly.

The Alexa Prize program has empowered numerous university students to explore, experiment, and showcase their talents in building conversational agents through challenges like the SocialBot Grand Challenge and the TaskBot Challenge. As conversational agents increasingly appear in multimodal and embodied contexts, it is important to explore the affordances of conversational interaction augmented with computer vision and physical embodiment. This paper describes the SimBot Challenge, a new challenge in which university teams compete to build robot assistants that complete tasks in a simulated physical environment. This paper provides an overview of the SimBot Challenge, which included both online and offline challenge phases. We describe the infrastructure and support provided to the teams including Alexa Arena, the simulated environment, and the ML toolkit provided to teams to accelerate their building of vision and language models. We summarize the approaches the participating teams took to overcome research challenges and extract key lessons learned. Finally, we provide analysis of the performance of the competing SimBots during the competition.

Amazon's Echo Show 8 is our pick for the best smart display for Alexa users, and it's now on sale for $75 at various retailers. While we've seen this deal before, it's still about $20 below the 8-inch display's typical street price and $55 off Amazon's list price. For reference, the device's all-time low is $70. This is only $5 more than the lowest price we've seen for this 8-inch smart display we recommend for Alexa users. We gave the Echo Show 8 a review score of 87 when it launched a couple of years ago, and we currently recommend it in our guides to the best smart displays and best smart home devices.

While Alexa was once simply a woman's name, it has become widely associated with Amazon, since the tech giant launched a smart assistant with the same name back in 2014. Not only is the AI-powered system named Alexa, it is also the default'wake word' used to alert Amazon devices that an instruction or question will follow. This has led to women named Alexa becoming the butt of recurring jokes in which their name is shouted, followed by a command. Unbeknown to many Alexa users, a sneaky trick lets you change your smart assistant's name, and even voice. However, there is a catch - as it stands, you can only choose from a few Amazon-sanctioned alternatives.

Amazon wants Alexa owners to buy more things. That's the clear impetus behind the new Alexa feature announced today at Amazon's Accelerate conference, called Customers Ask Alexa, which lets brands submit answers to common questions like "How can I remove pet hair from my carpet?" and "How to eliminate odor from soil stains?" Previously, Alexa supplied generic tips from the web and other sources in response to such queries. But Customers Ask Alexa basically turns answers into sponsored product spots. "Brands registered with Amazon Brand Registry will see the new Customers Ask Alexa feature in Seller Central, where they can easily discover and answer frequently asked customer questions using self-service tools," Amazon explains in a blog post.

Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents capable of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes, while achieving an average rating of at least 4.0/5.0. However, as conversational agents attempt to assist users with increasingly complex tasks, new conversational AI techniques and evaluation platforms are needed. The Alexa Prize TaskBot challenge, established in 2021, builds on the success of the SocialBot challenge by introducing the requirements of interactively assisting humans with real-world Cooking and Do-It-Yourself tasks, while making use of both voice and visual modalities. This challenge requires the TaskBots to identify and understand the user's need, identify and integrate task and domain knowledge into the interaction, and develop new ways of engaging the user without distracting them from the task at hand, among other challenges. This paper provides an overview of the TaskBot challenge, describes the infrastructure support provided to the teams with the CoBot Toolkit, and summarizes the approaches the participating teams took to overcome the research challenges.

Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is already a fount of knowledge on health topics ranging from the symptoms of chicken pox to how to relive a migraine. Now Amazon has teamed up with independent website Menopause Matters to provide answers to some of the most commonly asked questions around menopause. Alexa users in the UK can ask questions including'What treatments are available for the menopause?', 'What is perimenopause?', and'What are the benefits or risks of Hormone Replacement Therapy for menopause?' The news comes amid warnings that women going through the menopause are often mis-diagnosed with depression, because GPs do not know all the symptoms.

Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana can answer all sorts of questions that pop into users' heads, and they're improving every day. But what happens when a company like Amazon decides to crowdsource answers to fill gaps in its platform's knowledge? The result can range from amusing and perplexing to concerning. Alexa Answers allows any Amazon customer to submit responses to unanswered questions. When the web service launched in general availability a few weeks ago, Amazon gave assurances that submissions would be policed through a combination of automatic and manual review.