Now anyone can join Amazon's Q&A community to write answers for Alexa

September 13th

The Alexa Answers landing page. (Amazon)

Amazon has publicly opened its Q&A site Alexa Answers, where volunteers can submit answers to questions for Alexa.

The site contains a dashboard where volunteers can view open questions, and rate those submitted by others. If a volunteer answers a question well, they will be able to see how many times Alexa has used their answer, as well as customer feedback it received.

Users can gain points and climb the community's leaderboard, which is featured prominently on the site. At the time of this writing, the top user has submitted over 11,000 answers, and Alexa has used them over 8,000 times.

A list of current open questions (as of September 13, 2019) include:

How long do you bake sliced potatoes?
What's the grapefruit method?
Who is twitch underscore finas?
What's a substitute for cumin seeds?
How many secondary schools are there in england?
Is there a georgia in australia?

Amazon Alexa

Alexa is embedded in more devices than any other AI assistant, from kitchen appliances to cars, security cameras and jewlery. She also plays multiple roles. At times a home automator, Alexa can also be a point-of-contact with police and an audio playmate for children. She may also soon speak with others on your behalf, according to announcements from Amazon's latest hardware event. Follow news on Alexa here. Read more →

Alexa pushes deeper into ambient computing with new wearables and a long-distance wireless network

September 26th

At its annual hardware event, Amazon announced an array of new devices, appliances, and features for its Alexa AI assistant.

Alexa adds support for Hindi, India's most widely used language

September 18th

The move follows Amazon's Hindi language site and apps launch last year.

Amazon adds option allowing users to disable human reviews of their Alexa recordings

August 2nd

The move comes after Bloomberg discovered in April the company uses contractors and employees to review audio clips recorded by Alexa

Sections

Surveillance and Privacy

August 16th

AI-enabled technologies produce and rely on vast troves of personal data, most of which is unregulated and vulnerable to theft and misuse.

These technologies include:

Facial recognition: It helps users unlock their smartphones. It also helps police in China track criminal suspects and monitor members of the Uyghur ethnic minority.
Personalization: It helps consumers make necessary purchases and discover entertainment, but also encourages developers to collect personal data from increasingly far-flung sources.
Voice assistants: They help users answer questions, create calendar events, and set alarms. They also record audio accidentally, and until recently relied on human reviewers to listen to private audio to improve their responses.
Smart home products: Similar to voice assistants, these products allow users to remotely operate appliances, set temperatures and access security footage. They also collect a vast amount of private information about the home life of their users.

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