National
Feel like Alexa’s listening to you? This new gadget could stop it
If you have an Amazon Alexa, you’ve probably heard that it may be able to listen in on you, sometimes without your knowledge or consent.
But a new gadget promises to block Alexa’s purported eavesdropping, Forbes reported.
Alexagate is a device that sits on top of your Alexa or Amazon Echo and jams the microphone from picking up your voice, according to the machine’s creator MSCHF. While Alexa isn’t always listening to you, it’s ready to start once it hears a “wake word,” Amazon’s FAQ page says.
“The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word,” Lauren Raemhild, a spokeswoman for Amazon, told McClatchy in an email. “No audio is stored or sent to the cloud unless the device detects the wake word (or Alexa is activated by pressing a button). Any time audio is sent to the cloud, a visual indicator appears on your Echo device or an audio tone plays.”
However, Alexa and other artificial intelligence devices like it can be falsely activated by a variation of your wake word, or even from your TV, a study from Northeastern University and Imperial College London found.
Amazon released a statement regarding the study:
“We care deeply about customer privacy, and designed Echo devices to wake up only after detecting the wake word. Customers talk to Alexa billions of times a month and in very rare cases devices may wake up after hearing a word that sounds like ‘Alexa’ or one of the other available wake words. Our wake word detection and speech recognition get better every day – as customers use their devices, we optimize performance and improve accuracy. In fact, wake word performance improved by 50% in the last year alone.”
Before the Alexagate, there was a “condom” known as the Virtual Assistant Blocker that was created by CamSoda following reports that Alexa was recording sexual encounters, according to Forbes.
With the Alexagate, the user can clap three times to turn the machine on or off, MSCHF’s website says. Because it uses ultrasound, it’s “beyond the range of adult human hearing,” according to the website.
Alexagate doesn’t affect the speakers of your Echo device, so you can continue to listen to music even when it’s attached, the website says. But does Alexagate really block everything?
“It is possible to shout through Alexagate’s blocking, but we could only do it from about six inches away, yelling until our throats were hoarse,” MSCHF says. “Believe us when we say that the blocking is good.”
MSCHF is selling the product for $99 online.