Like so many of us, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant just wants to to be heard and understood, but often drowned by the discordant cacophony of 21st century life. But no more: Amazon is supposed to launch a new adaptive volume feature that will allow Alexa to respond more strongly if it is in a noisy environment.
In accordance with The Verge, who first reported on the news on Wednesday, the adaptive volume feature was designed to ensure that Alexa can be heard on any of the fairly standard background noises we usually find in our daily lives, including screaming children, roaring dishwashers or playing music from other devices. Currently only available to customers in the US, the feature can be activated by saying: “Alexa, turn on adaptive volume”.
The release of the feature follows the releases of Alexa Brief and Whisper mode in March, both reduce the volume and duration of voice assistant responses in case you have, for example, a baby sleeping in the house or you may not want to be called by a speaker every time you ask them what time will be like tomorrow. Aside from the new adaptive volume feature, whisper mode can be similarly activated by asking Alexa to “turn on whisper mode.”
The adaptive volume would mean that, once again, Alexa is getting smarter, and probably a smarter Alexa is worrying news for anyone who is. already worried about the device’s willingness to start recording user conversations as soon as someone triggers an echo voice activation saying Alexa’s call it out loud as a little tech Beetlejuice.
As Amazon itself once said, “Alexa and Echo devices are designed to record as little audio as possible and minimize the amount of background noise transmitted to the cBut an Alexa who is better than ever at analyzing background noise is ultimately better at hearing your conversations about the hustle and bustle of everyday life, which reinforces the large amount of data Amazon can build up with its most obvious surveillance mechanism.
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