Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Beware of Amazon's Alexa

Alexa is a device that listens for voice commands and can tell you the weather, order you pizza, and other Jetsonsesque living in the future things.  But it looks like the system is either too perfect or not perfect enough:
Which is exactly what happened today during CW6 in the morning when Jim Patton and Lynda Martin were talking about a child who accidentally bought a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies 
“I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse,’” said Patton. 
As soon as Patton said that, viewers all over San Diego started complaining their echo devices had tried to order doll houses.
I can see spammers using malware executing .WAV files to have Alexa order stuff.  If you want to take a walk on the bleeding edge of technology with Alexa, forewarned is forearmed.

1 comment:

drjim said...

Same reason I told my wife "NO WAY!" when she said she wanted buy an Echo.