Amazon Vows To Make Alexa Smarter, Kills Off Eavesdropping Bug

Amazon is about to make its Alexa voice assistant smarter. It has also killed off a bug that allowed Echo smart speakers to eavesdrop even when the devices have been switched off.

Earlier this week, the head of the Alexa Machine Learning team, Ruhi Sarikaya, wrote a blog post about the e-commerce giant’s plan of making Alexa more friction-free. According to Sarikaya, friction refers to any variable that impedes progress toward a goal and Amazon is “obsessively focused” on eliminating friction from the interactions of customers with the physical and digital world.

“[We’re] focused on making Alexa smarter and more natural to engage with,” Sarikaya said. “Our goals are to make it easier for users to discover and interact with the more than 40,000 third-party skills that developers have created for Alexa, and to improve Alexa’s ability to track context and memory within and across dialog sessions.”

To make its voice assistant smarter, Amazon is looking into enabling Alexa to dynamically arbitrate among skills using machine learning. This is intended to make the voice assistant capable of quickly providing users with useful answers to skill-related inquiries. For instance, users will no longer need to ask Alexa to access a skill to help them deal with a problem.

Instead of saying something like, “Alexa, open Tide Stain Remover and ask how to clean my shirt,” users can directly ask Alexa for information on how to remove a stain from their pants. Alexa will already know that it needs to access the Tide Remover Skill, activate it and give the proper information needed.

Amazon is also developing a feature called context carryover for Alexa. This will give the intelligent assistant a better understanding of multi-turn utterances and make it possible for Alexa to go with the flow of successive interactions. For example, users can ask, “Alexa, how’s the weather in Seattle?” and “What about this weekend?” in a consecutive manner and Alexa will be able to answer them easily because it knows the context of the conversation.

Lastly, Sarikaya shared that Alexa is getting a new memory feature, allowing the assistant to remember information for users and recall them when needed. For example, a user may tell Alexa to remember the birthday of his or her friend. Alexa will do as told and put this information in its memory and retrieve the data later on when the user needs to be reminded about it. All three features are rolling out to Alexa in the coming weeks, Forbes has learned.

Meanwhile, Amazon has issued a fix for a bug that enabled Echo devices to continue listening to their surroundings even when users have already switched them off. Security firm Checkmarx was the one to spot the issue after detecting and exploiting a vulnerability that allowed Alexa to eavesdrop or keep listening long after an Echo speaker has been shut down.

Amazon’s Echo speakers were designed to listen out for the word “Alexa” and the command that comes after it. This prompts the system to record the interaction made by a user with Alexa. Once the command is done, Alexa is expected to stop recording. But this seems to not be the case when the vulnerability is exploited. There’s no need to worry about the eavesdropping bug though. Amazon has already issued a fix for it, according to the Telegraph.