Amazon’s Echo:
Who’s Listening?
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Amazon Echo.
The name says it all. Well, almost.
An echo is the delayed reflection of a projected sound back to its listener. To make an echo, there must be an audience and a medium that’s conducive to creating the perceived effect.
Echoes also involve memory, where sound is held in our brains for one-tenth of a second. If a sound takes longer than 50 milliseconds to return to us when it’s reflected, it’s an echo; anything less is considered reverb.
Echoes represent a form of delayed interaction with a medium. Physical environments, like lakes and mountains, can create the conditions for an echo.
In a metaphorical sense, so can other people.
Echo that?
But what about technology? When we’re talking to an Echo—Amazon’s new product that is meant to sit in our living rooms—who’s the listener? What memory are we talking about? And what interactions are being reflected back to us?
#InformationPets
In its launch video, Echo is shown as something we keep around the house on coffee tables, bedroom nightstands, and in the kitchen. The “family” asks its newly-delivered Echo—named Alexa—how tall Mount Everest is, to spell words, tell them jokes, and to read the day’s news headlines out loud.
Alexa is also a taskmaster that adds items to the mother’s shopping list on command and wakes family members in the morning. Near the end of the clip, the father uses Echo to play music in an attempt to reKindle the romance with his wife.
Echo is a part of the family. An “information pet,” if you will.
That’s always listening.
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Echo monitors environmental sound using a seven-microphone array and “far-field” technology. A voice recognition algorithm determines when you are telling it to do something with an “awake word” that signals when the device should respond.
Similar to how Vox’s Dylan Matthews situates the Apple Watch, Amazon’s Echo is an illusion. It’s not really Echo that we are talking to. Echo represents a mediated reflection of our commands. While it’s programmed to do what we ask, it is, quite literally, a “black box” (or, if you really want to nitpick, a black tube).
That remembers.
It’s for Us.
Echo signals the coming wave of ambient “life interfaces.” It represents yet another opaque technological layer that mediates our lives—shaping the information we share with companies, how this data is used to model our behavior, and the information, ideas, and products that we encounter as a result.
Note the intentional use of plural pronouns.
At the beginning of Amazon’s video, the daughter, upon seeing the package asks: “Is it for me?” “No,” the father replies, “it’s for everyone.”
Apple’s “Siri,” Microsoft’s “Cortana,” and other voice UIs have a functionality comparable to Echo on smartphones, tablets—and soon—the things that we wear.
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Siri et al. have been built around the individual user experience, a form of interactivity that is distinctly personal.
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With Echo, Amazon has ushered in the first of what is arguably a new class of interface, “cloud furniture,” that is able to engage multiple users in shared interaction at the group level.
This design ethos can be seen in how the siblings in Amazon’s video fight with each other through Alexa, the family Echo, by changing each other’s songs and yelling at it to “stop.”
Amazon knows people already have smartphones they carry around with them. So while Echo is portable enough to be taken along on a trip, it’s meant to stay at home.
☁ Cloud Furniture
Bringing the cloud into the domain of the home at the group interface level, Amazon’s Echo is training wheels for the Internet of Things. Besides potentially ruining your birthday by allowing marketers access to your bedroom, anything that sits around the house with an internet connection and a “far-field” microphone array has a few privacy issues.
At the same time, Echo represents a brilliant product strategy: Amazon can chip away at the dominance of Google Search and Apple’s Siri at home. Echo could also reduce the socially stigmatizing use of personal devices (e.g., smartphones) when we’re in group settings.
Echo could even creep into the realm of audience measurement and ratings. If in fact it is “always ready,” the device has the potential to ID what’s playing on our smartphones, TVs, and keep tabs on what we’re saying when we’re not talking to it.
Echo truly makes us the “people formerly known as the audience.”
It isn’t just a talking speaker, it’s the new audience, allowing companies to record, monitor and predict our interests, behavior, and consumption habits.
Echo will affect our lives in ways we have yet to comprehend. This kind of technology creep matters. A manifestation of the algorithmic “black box” that Zeynep Tufekci speaks of in a recent First Monday article, whether Echo proves to be a success or a flop, the emergence of cloud furniture is a big step forward in our relationship with technology.
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[Echo is an ingenious name for Amazon’s product. Why? Because while users create the sounds that launch it into action, Echo is both the listener (audience) and the medium of reflection].
“Amazon’s Echo: Who’s Listening?” by Jonathan Albright is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
