Amazon Will Listen to All Your Voice Recordings If You Use Alexa+

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-will-listen-to-all-your-voice-recordings-if-you-use-alexa-2000576755

Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa assistant is going to need all your voice recordings, and there’s nothing you can do about it. An email sent to Alexa users notes the online retail giant is ending one of its few privacy provisions about recorded voice data in the lead up to Alexa+. The only way to make sure Amazon doesn’t get a hold of any of your vocals may be to quit using Alexa entirely. Gizmodo reached out to Amazon for confirmation, though we did not immediately hear back.

You can find the full email on Reddit (as first reported by Ars Technica), which plainly states the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting on Alexa is being discontinued on March 28. Anybody who has the setting enabled will have it automatically revoked, and Amazon will then be able to process your voice recordings. Amazon claims it will delete the recordings once it’s done processing your request.

“As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature,” the email reads. “If you do not take action, your Alexa Settings will automatically be updated to ‘Don’t save recordings.’ This means that, starting on March 28, your voice recording will be sent to and processed in the cloud, and they will be deleted after Alexa processes your requests. any previously saved voice recordings will also be deleted.”

Alexa+, Amazon’s upcoming AI version of its normally inconsistent voice assistant, is supposed to allow for far more utility than it had in the past. The new assistant should be able to order groceries via multiple apps including Amazon Fresh and Instacart for you based on broad requests like “get me all the ingredients I need to make a pizza at home.” It’s supposed to set smart home routines, access your security footage, and look for Prime Video content in a conversational manner. The other big headline feature is Voice ID, where Amazon claims Alexa can identify who is speaking to it. The AI theoretically should  learn users’ habits over time and tailor its responses to each individual.

Alexa+ is supposed to come to all current Echo Show devices and will supposedly make its way to future Echo products as well. If you have an Amazon Prime account, you’ll get immediate access to Alexa+. Without the subscription, you’ll need to cough up another $20 a month for the sake of talking to AI-infused Alexa. The tradeoff is now you will have to offer your vocals to the online retail giant for it to do as it pleases.

There are more than a few reasons you don’t want Amazon anywhere near your voice data. For years, Amazon’s default setting gave workers access to user data, even offering some the ability to listen to users’ Alexa recordings. In 2023, the company paid out $25 million to the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it gave employees access to children’ s voice data and Ring camera footage. For its part, Amazon said it had changed its data practices to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, aka COPPA. Amazon’s privacy track record is spotty, at best. The company has long been obsessed with users’ voice data. In 2023, Amazon revealed it was using Alexa voice recordings to help train its AI. Gizmodo reached out to Amazon to confirm whether Alexa+ voice recordings will also be used to train the company’s AI models. We will update this story once we hear back.

Unlike Apple, which made big claims about data protections with its “private cloud compute” system for processing cloud-based AI requests anonymously, Amazon has made far fewer overtures to keeping user data safe. Smaller AI models can run on-device, but those few examples we have of on-device capabilities from the likes of Windows Copilot+ laptops or Gemini on Samsung Galaxy S25 phones are—in their current iteration—little more than gimmicks. Alexa+ wants to be the first instance of true assistant AI with cross-app capabilities, but it may also prove a privacy nightmare from a company that has  routinely failed to protect users’ data.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

March 17, 2025 at 10:27AM

Why new tech only feels good for a short time

https://www.popsci.com/health/why-new-tech-only-feels-good-for-a-short-time/

A friend recently sent me a video about getting Red Dead Redemption 2 running on an old CRT television by YouTuber Any Austin, which I obviously watched because I love gimmicky tech videos involving obsolete things. I was expecting to laugh at something mixing retro and current technology, and that happened, but then the video wandered into human psychology. 

I thought it would be ridiculous to play a modern game on such an old TV, mostly because it is. But after playing for a little bit he realized that, once you get used to it, playing a modern game on a TV that’s been obsolete for decades just…doesn’t feel that different. Sure, there were annoyances—certain things were cropped off the screen—but for the most part the game was just as immersive and fun on an ancient TV as on a contemporary one. 

“The human brain is just really good at normalizing basically anything that isn’t directly causing us to die,” Any Austin explains in the video. “Your brand new PC is probably giving you about the same amount of joy as your old PC. Your great fancy new job probably feels just about as soul sucking as your old job, provided you control for other factors like money.” 

That…can’t be how human brains work. Can it? I decided to look into the psychology. (Spoiler: It’s exactly how human brains work.)

The Hedonic Treadmill

The psychological phenomenon known as the hedonic treadmill has been well documented since at least the 1970s. The concept refers to how humans tend to revert to a baseline level of happiness after positive or negative changes in their lives. There may be a spike in happiness after a wedding, a promotion at work, or buying a new TV, but that is temporary—people tend to eventually revert to their previous levels of happiness. The same thing is true about negative life changes. 

An early study showing this, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1978, examined the relative happiness of three groups: lottery winners, people who went through serious automobile accidents, and a control group. The lottery winners’ results were surprising: 

Lottery winners and controls were not significantly different in their ratings of how happy they were now, how happy they were before winning (or, for controls, how happy they were 6 months ago), and how happy they expected to be in a couple of years. 

Now, there was nuance in the study. The victims of car accidents did not adapt to the same extent, though the study notes that “the accident victims did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected.” Even so, the hedonic treadmill has been replicated in study after study over the years. Positive and negative changes alike tend to have a big impact on our levels of happiness in the short term but over time, we revert back to our base levels of happiness. 

What does this have to do with playing Red Dead Redemption on an ancient TV? The same psychological tendency is in play. If you bought the TV of your dreams tomorrow there could be a honeymoon period during which you feel that it is making your video game experience better, and that could make you happier. 

After that period, though, you’ll get right back to the same level of satisfaction as before. Eventually maybe you hear about a newer, better TV, which you now want to buy in order to get that same happiness boost you got from buying the last one. That’s why this is called a treadmill: you think the next purchase will permanently boost your happiness only to end up right back where you started. 

How to Get Off the Treadmill

Knowing this, how can we get more satisfaction out of our gadgets? The answer might be spending more time thinking about how much you enjoy the things you already have. A 2011 paper by Kennon M. Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, showed that regularly thinking about the positive changes in your life—and thinking less about hypothetical future changes—can help maintain the increase in happiness. From the conclusion: 

In other words, because of the very adaptation processes examined in the current research, the appeal of the new car, house, or handbag that initially brought pleasure begins to fade, such that people are soon tempted to buy an even better car, house, or handbag, trying to regain the initial exhilaration that has gone missing. However, in a world of expanding debt, declining resources, and questionable sustainability, it seems imperative to arrest or minimize this process, so that people can learn to be content with less. Our study suggests that this is an attainable goal, realizable when people make efforts to be grateful for what they have and to continue to interact with it in diverse, surprising, and creative ways.

The specifics of appreciating changes in creative ways aren’t laid out, but I think Any Austin’s video ends with a pretty good one: occasionally switching out your current tech for something ancient, then switching back to modern tech. 

Hear me out on this: Here’s what you should do. Buy two TVs: a small 720p one and then a bigger 1080p one. Anytime you get the hankering for something new you just switch back and forth between them. Going from the big one to the small one will feel cute and novel and cozy, and then going from the small one to the big one we feel like this huge immersive upgrade. 

I am far from a psychology expert, and I think Any Austin would admit the same thing. Given the hedonistic upgrade, though, this doesn’t sound like the worst idea—you could, in theory, give yourself that little happiness boost from trying something new on a regular basis. You’re tricking yourself into appreciating the thing you already have instead of dwelling on how much better life would be if you had something even better. 

You don’t have to go to this extreme, though. Just know that the research suggests you’ll be happier with your tech if you spend more time appreciating what you have and less time dreaming about what you could buy instead.

The post Why new tech only feels good for a short time appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

March 17, 2025 at 08:58AM