According to a recent report, Amazon is aware that many owners of its Alexa devices are not using them after as little as two weeks of use. According to internal documents viewed by Bloomberg, as many as 25 percent of Amazon’s smart home assistants become expensive paperweights just weeks after being activated.
A recent article from the Atlantic outlines how the name Alexa has become so synonymous with Amazon’s personal assistant that the number of children being named Alexa is plummeting.
In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal notes that Amazon’s e-commerce platform is still largely populated by fake reviews and inflated product ratings, giving customers an inaccurate view of product quality.
Researchers at the University of Washington have reportedly found a new way to screen for irregular heartbeats — using smart speakers such as the Amazon Alexa or Google Home to detect variations in heart rhythms.
Even as the criticism of Wikipedia’s left-wing political bias intensifies, including from the site’s co-founder Larry Sanger, the major tech platforms continue to use the online encyclopedia in their services and rely on it as a model for addressing “fake news” concerns. Rather than improving their services, the integration of Wikipedia into Big Tech platforms has, instead, made them disseminate false or biased information.
Numerous high-profile pages on Wikidata, a data site affiliated with Wikipedia, contained long-standing defamatory vandalism according to criticism site Wikipediocracy. This included First Lady Melania Trump, who was labeled a “former sex worker and porn star” on Wikidata for more than a week. Many Wikipedia-affiliated sites use Wikidata’s information, so the description consequently appeared at her page on Simple Wikipedia, whose target audience expressly includes children, and remained for over a week.
The Daily Mail reported that home assistants could soon report their owners to the police for breaking the law based on a “Moral A.I.” system, if the ideas of academics in Europe are implemented.
Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada, is offering guests an Amazon Alexa-powered sex tape recording studio during the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, this week.
An “error” granted a man who uses Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant access to another user’s 1,700 voice recordings, according to a report.
An African grey parrot used an Amazon Alexa-powered home assistant to order snacks while its owner was away, according to a report.
Home assistants are creepy and terrifying. Don’t buy them.
Amazon has fixed its A.I. assistant Alexa after devices were describing CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta as a “fake journalist.”
A team of researchers has revealed a potentially dangerous vulnerability in Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant.
