Big Sister is Listening

A chap called Victor Collins was found dead in James Bates' hot tub in Arkansas in 2015.  After watching football in the evening, Bates said that he had left Collins in the tub and gone to bed.  Bates maintained that the death was an accident but the Police charged him with murder by strangulation.  "Alexa" was a key witness in the case.  Bates had been playing music through Alexa so, unless someone had commanded Alexa  to "stop," the robotic microphones would have remained open and recorded anything suspicious.  The Amazon servers would have retained the recording but Amazon refused the Police access on the grounds of privacy.  Bates asked Amazon to release the recording because, he claimed, since he had done nothing wrong, there would be nothing recorded to incriminate him.  Apparently, this was the first case of a smart speaker providing evidence in a court case.

Meantime, it has been estimated that by 2021, there will be more digital assistants on the planet than humans. In a survey, almost half of regular voice technology users love their assistant so much that they wish it was a real person.  And more than a quarter say they have a sexual fantasy about their assistant!