Amazon Kills The Do Not Send Voice Recordings Option on Echo At The End of The Month
Send Us Voice Recordings Or Your Echo Gets It!
If you are an Amazon Echo user and recently got an odd email from the company that you haven’t yet taken a look at, you might want to. As of March 28th you will no longer be able to choose the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option and still have a working Voice ID feature on any Echo device. As of that date everything Alexa hears will be uploaded to Amazon cloud, you will no longer be able to have it processed locally. Amazon touts the security of the encrypted transfer of your voice and the cloud devices it ends up on, and goes so far as to suggest that the recordings will be deleted after they are processed but will no longer allow you to prevent the uploading of voice recordings to Amazon.
If you guessed this is to feed the insatiable hunger of AI, you are absolutely correct. Amazon Echo needs those precious voice recordings for Alexa+ and Alexa Voice ID. They simply cannot stand the idea that the connected services behind an Echo might not be able to instantaneously recognize which member of your household is speaking near the device. To ensure that horrific occurrence cannot be permitted to occur Amazon will brick the Voice ID feature on any device with the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option selected.
Ars Technica lists the many valid reasons why many do not trust Amazon’s assurances, and why you shouldn’t them with your voice recordings either.
In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon's cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
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Oh the joy of being in the EU