By: Nicole Nguyen
Amazon has filed a patent application with the US Patent and Trademark Office describing a technology that would allow the Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices to capture what you say before a wake word, like “Alexa,” is uttered. Currently, Alexa devices only record and send audio to Amazon servers if a wake word is detected. Should Amazon decide to develop or implement the technology, an Alexa-enabled device would constantly record and delete what you say using the device’s local memory storage.
The patent application, which was made public today, offers insight into Amazon’s ambitions to expand the capabilities of its voice recognition technology. Alexa devices currently can’t understand commands when the wake word comes after or in the middle of a sentence. But images in the patent application offer “Play some music, Alexa” and “Play some music, Alexa. The Beatles, please” as examples.
“While such phrasings may be natural for a user, current speech processing systems are not configured to handle commands that are not preceded by a wakeword,” wrote the patent application’s authors, Kurt Wesley Piersol and Gabriel Beddingfield. “Offered is a system to correct this problem.”
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “The technology in this patent is not in use, and referring to the potential use of patents is highly speculative.” The spokesperson added that Amazon files many patent applications that are not ultimately implemented into consumer-facing products, and that patents do not necessarily reflect “current or near-future states of products and services.”
Read more >> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-echo-record-audio-before-alexa-wakeword-patent
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