2/20 — 2/27 Weekly Reflection

This week, I had some difficulties coding for the Smart Home skill. I will be working on it into this week and hopefully have a working skill for next week. After discussing my thesis project with a few people, I noticed a trend in responses; not many people trust Alexa. One person told me the spice rack could be a useful tool, but they would not use it because they do not like to use Alexa. This prompted me to do some research into the privacy concerns with the product I chose to work with.

I discovered this Medium post written by another college student who develops Alexa skills. A lot of the negative press comes from reported situations where Alexa picked up on user voice commands when they weren’t intending to use the interface. And although some words in the conversation could have been interpreted as certain invocations, the invasion of privacy the user felt was enough to provoke outrage. According to the author, all privacy settings that could breach user security can be toggled off on Alexa, so many situations that users believe can happen, can be prevented.

In my opinion, modern technology requires much more information about the user to be effective. Machine learning allows the same product to offer personalized experiences for its users based on collected data. I believe that this tailored approach is becoming the norm and is necessary for providing users with cutting edge features that wouldn’t be possible without access to certain user variables. I also believe that lack of research and deceptive news headlines have caused misunderstanding and fear of Alexa and products like it. In the future, whenever I encounter someone who has reservations about using Alexa while explaining my project, I will include some of what I learned in my research into debunking some of these privacy concerns.