Mediastreet
Tag

Alexa

Browsing
In News

Lawsuit alleges Amazon uses Alexa interactions for ad targeting without users’ knowledge or consent

No Comments

By Lisa Stiffler

In-depth Amazon coverage from the tech giant’s hometown, including e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more.

Amazon’s Alexa is the target of a new lawsuit alleging that the company is using information gathered from users of its smart speaker devices to serve them targeted advertising without their consent.

The plaintiffs are pursuing the case as a class action suit, which if approved could include millions of Amazon customers.

The lawsuit relies heavily on an April study by researchers from the University of Washington and three other institutions. The study concluded that Amazon is analyzing users’ commands and interactions with the smart speakers to infer their potential shopping interests. That information is used to target “on-platform audio ads and off-platform web ads from Amazon or its advertising partners,” the researchers explained in an FAQ.

In response to the study, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed for The Register that information from Alexa was used for ad selection. On Thursday, the company offered GeekWire a similar response, and went on to challenge the accuracy of the research.

“We think that the best advertising is tailored to customers’ interests, which is why in some cases we will use the actions of customers, whether it’s shopping on Amazon or streaming on Amazon Music, to inform the ads we serve,” said spokesperson Lisa Levandowski by email. “For example, if you ask Alexa to order paper towels or to play a particular song on Amazon Music, the record of that purchase or song play may inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads.

“This is not an atypical practice — the biggest advertising services in the world do this to best serve their users and their advertisers,” Levandowski continued, noting that customers can opt out of the targeted ads.

As regards the lawsuit, Levandowski said, “We do not comment on active litigation.”

Advertising is a big and growing business for Amazon. In April the company reported that its ad arm brought in $7.8 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the year, up 23% over a year ago.

The lawsuit, which was filed last week in U.S. District Court, cited numerous past occasions where Amazon officials have denied using insights gathered in this manner for ad purposes.

“Amazon’s admission that it does, in fact, use Alexa voice prompts to inform targeted advertising placed by Amazon throughout its vast advertising network is shocking, especially coming after years of repeatedly disavowing any such usage,” said the plaintiffs.

“At no point in these many various terms and policies does Amazon disclose that users’ voice recordings are used to inform targeted advertising.”

The suit was filed by two individuals residing in Ohio and Massachusetts. The legal action was reported Thursday morning by Axios.

The lawsuit notes that 13 separate Amazon documents describe the terms and conditions for Alexa users. “At no point in these many various terms and policies does Amazon disclose that users’ voice recordings are used to inform targeted advertising,” the suit continues. “In fact, the words ‘ads,’ ‘advertising,’ ‘advertise,’ and ‘advertisements’ do not appear a single time…”

This isn’t the first time that Amazon’s Alexa has triggered legal action. In June 2019 a pair of lawsuits claimed the voice assistant violates laws in nine states by illegally storing recordings of children on devices such as the Echo or Echo Dot.

The new research into targeted ads included the University of California-Davis, the University of California-Irvine and Northeastern University in addition to the UW. The study’s lead author was Umar Iqbal, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Iqbal works with professor Franziska Roesner, who also contributed to the research.

To conduct the work, the researchers created personas with particular interests that interacted with Alexa, and a control that did not. Then in a multi-step process the researchers looked for targeted advertising based on the Alexa commands.

Amazon’s Levandowski challenged the veracity of the study.

“As far as this specific research is concerned, it’s not accurate because it’s based on inaccurate assumptions of how Alexa works,” she said. “For example, we do not sell customers’ personal information and we do not share Alexa requests with advertising networks, even though the report suggests that we do.”

The study’s authors said they’re trying to make the public aware of how the increasingly pervasive technology works behind the scenes.

“Studies like ours,” they wrote, “help to bring transparency into the space of voice assistants and the implications of using them.”

Read the full lawsuit: Download this PDF

Feature Image Credit: (Nicolas J Leclercq Photo via Unsplash)

By Lisa Stiffler

GeekWire contributor Lisa Stiffler is a reporter, editor and Northwest native who nearly two decades ago swapped a lab coat for a reporter’s notebook. Covers local efforts to use technology to solve environmental, health, societal and other do-gooder challenges. Follow @lisa_stiffler and email [email protected].

Sourced from GeekWire

 

Read More
By
In News

Adobe and Amazon launch Alexa skill aimed at creatives, the Inspiration Engine

No Comments

By Jenny Brewer.

Adobe and Amazon have collaborated on a new Alexa skill aimed at creatives, titled the Inspiration Engine. Ask your Alexa-controlled device to “open the Inspiration Engine” and you can unlock a host of features intended to aid creative block and inspire work. This ranges from “quick sparks” – inspirational quotes and one-sentence “meditations” from creatives such as Jessica Walsh, Pascal Campion or Weitong Mai – to creative-thinking exercises that can, for example, guide the viewer through one’s senses or environment in order to explore a project from a new perspective.

With an Alexa-compatible screen device, users can ask for inspirational imagery, displayed on Behance, Adobe’s online portfolio site. Users can also take the Creative Types quiz, created for Adobe by Anyways, which asks a series of multiple choice questions to define an individual creative personality – for example an Adventurer (seen above), a Visionary or a Dreamer. Previously an in-browser experience, for the Inspiration Engine, Alexa will take users through the quiz and reveal their type.

The launch comes off the back of a recent study by Adobe, finding that 89% of respondents often struggle to find inspiration. This new Alexa skill targets those designers and artists “staring at an empty page, canvas or dartboard for too long,” says Adobe on its blog, and hopes, with the new tool, to be involved in the earliest stage of the creative process – whereas its other products are used once ideas have already sprouted.

The Inspiration Engine is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Feature Image Credit: Anyways: Adobe Creative Types, the Adventurer

By Jenny Brewer.

Sourced from It’s Nice That

Read More
By
In News

Will Alexa And Siri Leave Voiceover Actors With Anything To Say?

No Comments

By

Consumers have been talking to artificial voices for a while now. We know Alexa and Siri and a few others by names. Some kids talk to them like they’re a member of the family.

The always don’t seem real — but maybe real-like. These AI voices use natural language processing, and sometimes when they don’t understand the question, they’ll even say, “Hmmmm,” just the way you might if you’re a little stumped.

Joan Baker, a voiceover pro, and Rudy Gaskins, a producer-director and her husband, don’t seem so worried about what AI means for the future of the voiceover profession.

Baker says, “I hear a lot of people talking about it. A lot. I see it talked about on Facebook pages. They’ll write, ‘Oh, they’re going to take our jobs.’”

Time will tell. “Will synthesized voices rule the day someday? It is the wild West,” Gaskins says. “My guess is that as the generations go on, they’ll become less averse to it.”

But he adds, with a sentence that would have seemed nonsensical to utter just a few decades ago, “There will always be the need for a human voice.”

There are a few firms, like LyreMaker and Animaker (“As Real As It Gets”) that offer ways to create a real voice, but most of the time  a “computer voice” won’t fool anyone.
And in fact, as AI voices proliferate, the media role for human voices might actually become even more in demand. Or else AI voices will skim off the mundane voiceovers of phone prompts and such, leaving the better jobs to real people. Or AI will get much better at imitating real voices.

Still, who knows? As Gaskins points out, virtually every job in the tech economy is not what it once was.

“Right now, my competition is a stereo system,” Baker says.

Baker and Gaskins created the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences in 2014. It holds seminars and gives The Voice Arts Awards each November  for outstanding voiceover work in commercials, programs, podcasts and video games. Baker is also the author of “Secrets of Voiceover Success” a kind of how-to as told by top talent.

So they have an evangelistic zeal about the business, and theories about the unconscious power of real voices. Gaskins says the importance of the human voice is innate. “A lot of what we feel about the voice we began feeling in utero,” when a baby in its mother’s womb reacts to the sound of her voice. “It is that connected.”

Take, for example, “the voice of God,” probably the phrase many people have heard relating to voiceover work. That’s the  unseen, commanding, deep-throated (usually) male voice you might parody if you were trying to imitate a movie trailer (an association stemming from the late Don LaFontaine, whose voiceover movie trailer line that began, “In a world…” is now a knowing joke and the name of a 2013 movie about the business.).

“But what does that phrase tell you?” Baker asks. “It talks about that voice representing the  overwhelming power, and that God thing can get dangerous. That’s powerful. I’ve used that phrase in a group of of non-voice actors, and some of them were offended that I could say such a thing: the voice of God!”

By

Sourced from MediaPost

Read More
By
In News

Amazon forced to respond to Echo privacy concerns after Alexa records intimate conversation

No Comments

By Rebecca Stewart

Amazon has been forced to issue a statement explaining a malfunction that caused Alexa to record a customer’s private conversation and send it to a contact.

A woman in Portland, identified only as Danielle, told KIRO 7, a Washington state TV station, that her Echo had recorded a conversation between herself and her husband and shared it with one of the latter’s employees in Seattle.

Raising questions about whether the Echo was tuned to always listen in to customers, Danielle said she didn’t realise the exchange had been recorded until her husband’s co-worker contacted her with specific details about the chat.

She then said she felt “invaded” and described the incident as a “total privacy invasion,” adding that she was “never plugging the device in again”.

Amazon confirmed to Danielle that the audio had been sent to the number, but said this was an “extremely rare occurrence”.

In a later statement, the company went into greater detail about what had happened, and why Alexa had forwarded the conversation.

“Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa’. Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’.”

Amazon continued: “As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”

‘Creepy laugh’

Amazon has always maintained that its smart speaker only listens in when activated. Users can review, listen and delete the audio Amazon holds on them in their Echo settings menu.

However, this isn’t the first time the firm has been forced to explain unusual behaviour from Alexa.

Back in March, the e-commerce giant issued an urgent update after the AI developed a glitch which caused it to randomly erupt into fits of “creepy” laughter.

Unamused customers were quick to voice complaints about the rogue speakers after being freaked out by the unsolicited response, including some who were woken in the middle of the night and others who were caught off guard while watching TV.

Once again, Amazon said “rare circumstances” had caused its speaker may pick up a “false positive” for the command “Alexa, laugh”, prompting the bizarre behavior.

Among Amazon’s many patent applications is one that could potentially allow Alexa to listen into users at all times to build up a detailed picture of what consumers buy, or want to buy, from Amazon.

The patent, filed in April 2018, suggested that in future Alexa could listen out for certain words like ‘love’ or ‘hate’ to glean consumers’ preferences.

 

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from THEDRUM

Read More
By