Last week, I misplaced my Moto X. This happens a lot; I work from home, I’m a generally disorganized human, and I have a toddler who loves to grab smartphone-sized objects and hide them under or behind large pieces of furniture. Rather than frantically try to call it from another phone (or from the internet), I simply cleared my throat and asked my handset where it was. Seconds later, the Moto X was back in my pocket. Such is the magic of the always-listening age.
We’ve long since accepted always-on gadgets that track our steps, or webcams that monitor our front doors, or websites that remember our every search query. Handing our vitals over to electronics is nothing new. But the idea of technology that doesn’t watch and feel but listens carries with it an extra patina of creep. Always-listening devices like the Moto X or Amazon Echo speaker feel more intrusive somehow, a shiny eavesdropper stationed silently on your kitchen counter.
It’s an understandable backlash, fueled most recently by a Samsung Smart TV privacy disclosure that contained some unsettling wording about who exactly was listening in:
Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.
The third party, in this case, is the third-party company to which Samsung outsources the speech-to-text work that makes voice recognition possible in the first place. And you can opt out at any time. Still, it sounds spooky! And there’s likely to be more on the way; high-profile smartphones like the Nexus 6 and Galaxy Note 4 incorporate the feature, while a coming generation of tablets and low-powered PCs will have the ability to listen in on your every word.
Gaffes like Samsung’s shouldn’t send us running from always-listening tech, though. In fact, gadgets that await our every command are a doorway to a convenience-stuffed future. And it doesn’t come with the privacy costs that you might have assumed.
Where’s My Phone?
When we think of devices whose microphones are constantly picking up sound, there’s a tin-foil temptation to picture all of our conversations being fed in real-time to a centralized Big Brother listening station. In practice, that’s simply not the case, for reasons both practical and privacy-driven.
To understand exactly how always-listening tech on devices like the Moto X, Amazon Echo, Microsoft Kinect, and more works, it’s helpful to walk through my recent lost-phone example.
An important first clarification: I skipped a step in my description above. I didn’t just ask my Moto X where it was; first I had to say “Okay, Google Now.” If I hadn’t, my “always-listening” phone would have gone on happily ignoring me. Like most devices that stand at the ready to respond to voice commands, the Moto X requires a trigger word before it actually does anything with what it’s hearing.
This means that nothing you say in the presence of your Moto X, Nexus 6, Amazon Echo, and so on gets shuttled to a remove server unless you specifically want it to. “The phone does not record or transmit while it is waiting for the trigger phrase,” confirmed Steve Sinclair, vice president of Motorola product marketing. “In fact, doing so would undermine the power efficiency that enables Moto Voice to work.” Amazon declined to comment for this story, but its Echo FAQ page confirms that its Bluetooth speaker also “uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word.” In other words, voice recognition on both of these devices is cut off from the cloud until you want it to connect.
Back to my missing phone. Once my Moto X had “woken up,” it began recording my request (in this case, a very frustrated “Where’s my phone?”). It can capture sound for up to 15 seconds, after which it converts your speech to text for processing, and either responds to the request locally or ships it off to Google’s servers.
In my case, the device was able to respond to my query without off-boarding any information at all; it simply fired off a pinging sound until I could eventually track it down behind a nightstand. But even if I’d made a cloud-intensive request (“What’s it like outside?”) the Moto X would have forgotten it immediately after it had responded. The only trace of it, according to Sinclair, would be that it could show up in my Google Search history, which seems fair given that I would have been searching on Google.
Echo takes a slightly different—but still non-invasive—approach. After you say its trigger word, the speaker immediately begins streaming audio to the cloud, and continues until your question or request has been fully processed. For the extra-cautious, you can also adjust settings so that Echo makes a sound when it starts and stops recording you. Amazon also gives you the option to delete everything Echo has recorded, if you don’t like the idea of leaving a trace of the Bass Drops & Fist Bumps playlist you requested.
The important distinction in all of this is that “always listening” doesn’t mean “always transmitting,” and the things you send back to the mothership don’t stay there if you don’t want them to.
Real Talk
That’s not to imply that always-listening devices carry no privacy risk at all. The information they collect will be as vulnerable as any that gets stored on servers, which is varying degrees of scary depending on whose servers we’re talking about.
The idea, though, that sending a 15-second voice command to the cloud is any more or less disquieting than anything you’ve typed into your Chrome search bar in the last three years is misplaced. If anything, the limitations of voice recognition are likely to mean your searches are simpler, more direct, more benign. Put another way: You’re unlikely to ask Amazon Echo about a private fetish, and even if you did, it wouldn’t be very helpful in return. Important to note, too, that you can always just turn the feature off.
Despite clumsy wording like Samsung’s, always-listening devices aren’t the laying the Panopticon’s foundation. They are, though, a significant step towards unlocking a world of convenience we’ve only dreamed of. Or just towards finding your damn phone.
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