6 hours ago
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She is always listening. She is unfailingly polite. She is often obtuse. She is sometimes helpful. She frequently frustrates. She isn’t great with bashment artists. Or grime. Or drum’n’bass. She needs to be spoken to slowly and clearly, as you’d talk to an aged relative with diminished faculties. She doesn’t like French accents.
‘“Alexa, how long do wasps live for?”
“Alexa, how long do wasps live if you hit them with a tea towel and then a saucepan?”
In September 2016, a new presence appears in our house, squatting on the kitchen counter between the kettle and the coffee machine. It is blandly futuristic, a minimal cylinder with an LED ring that glows blue to alert us to the fact that it is ready, poised to answer our questions or carry out our instructions, as long as those instructions are clearly stated and fall within a narrow band of available “skills”.
More often than I’d like, the solid blue glow is replaced by a rotating wash of green to tell us that an Amazon order is on its way. Occasionally, the light is red: this happens when someone has turned off the microphone to seize control of the device and impose their music on all of us. Our Amazon Echo is primarily used as the family Bluetooth speaker, and a glance through the music played on it demonstrates that there is very little common ground between our differing tastes. In a household with three young people, the kitchen is a place of musical education and dispute, with the Echo the communal weapon of choice.
Our Echo is one of the early ones: essentially a smart speaker connected to a server where the fairly rudimentary Alexa voice assistant attempts to turn our requests and questions into actions and answers. More recent incarnations have screens that allow you to make video calls or stream TV programmes, inevitably, through Amazon Prime. And, when Amazon releases its long-awaited, generative AI-enabled update in the next few weeks or months, my aged unit will be incompatible with Alexa+. It won’t remember my favourite movies or meals, and it won’t help me plan a night out or book an Uber or find a babysitter. But given what Alexa (and, by extension, Amazon) has heard and analysed and stored in the nine years they have been eavesdropping on us, I am happy to settle for our first-generation Echo’s more limited capabilities.
Last year, I realised that my relationship with Amazon predated my mortgage, my marriage, parenthood, two distinct careers and a host of other significant life moments. To see if I could distil anything of value – the contours of a 21st-century adulthood, perhaps – from all the information Amazon holds about me, I requested all the available data using an almost impossible to find link. Would I be reassured or disturbed when I found out what Amazon and Alexa knew about my family?
A couple of days later, I received an email containing links to gigabytes of information: particulars of every purchase I’ve ever made – from the noir novel I bought on the day that Amazon UK launched to the 28th pair of headphones acquired in as many years. Records of every page turn of every Kindle ebook I’ve opened, every moment of Prime content I’ve watched, measured by the second. And, of course, the details of every interaction we have ever had with our Echo; every question asked, every song requested, every timer set.
They don’t make it easy to find gold among the fields of data available for download. Folder and file names are opaque and unhelpful. Competence with spreadsheets is useful and a subscription to a powerful AI assistant is advantageous. Time and patience are necessary. One folder contains nothing but thousands and thousands of sound files, all with the same date and each with a nonsensical string of characters instead of a name. It is definitely fun to click on these at random and hear the voices of various family members mispronouncing band names, asking for Pokémon jokes or demanding that Alexa “play a fart noise”. But without any semblance of order to the files, going through 15,000 of them (“Alexa, never mind”) would truly be a sisyphean task. Or a briefly entertaining family parlour game.
Fortunately, along with the sound files, Amazon provides spreadsheets and spreadsheets of text-based data that reduces the amount of time needed to assess our Alexa usage from months to days. Using these spreadsheets and searching for the word “play”, I can see that nearly half of the 15,000 “utterances” registered by Alexa have been instructions to play a song, album or playlist, while 1,823 of them have been the setting of a timer. In our 15,000 utterances we have only said “please” to Alexa 41 times, though, in our defence, we only told her to fuck off twice.
These commands allow me to trace the development of the musical tastes of my children: from being a Kanye-obsessed schoolboy, my oldest has diversified his listening, with Bowie and the Smiths appearing as data clusters during university holidays. My middle child’s musical awakening begins with Loyle Carner, though more recently she has apparently developed a liking for vocal jazz. And the youngest has thankfully exited her phonk phase and now fills the kitchen with riot grrrl as she empties the dishwasher. Looking through the list of music played, I see little evidence of my wife’s musical preferences in the data, aside from her oft-used “Alexa, volume down, VOLUME DOWN” instruction.
Then, in one cryptically named folder, I find a rich seam of precious material: transcripts of more 1,500 questions that we have asked Alexa since 2018. Ranging from the prosaic (“Alexa, how many days until 28 October?”) to the troubling (“Alexa, what is hentai?”) to the downright bizarre (“Alexa, do jellyfish have bottoms?”), these questions indicate that there is very little we won’t ask our little speaker-dwelling friend. Once I’d read the transcripts of everything we’d asked, I saw that we use Alexa as a surrogate, filling in for all sorts of roles that might be missing due to physical absence, knowledge gaps, or lack of attention or patience.
At different points over the last six or so years, Alexa has been our on-call veterinarian, substitute teacher, big sister, parent, therapist, adjudicator and whipping boy, on top of her familiar roles as DJ and voice-activated timer. She has helped with maths homework, reassured us that, no, bananas are not poisonous to dogs, taught us how to say “so cool” in French (“tellement cool”) and settled the argument of whether Canada is bigger than Russia. My mistake – thanks, Alexa.
But she has also advised us on things we can do to make ourselves happy; informed us what might be the appropriate age to start dating (“A good age for teenagers to start dating is 16,” says Dr Eagar of HealthyChildren.org. “A parent can add or subtract a year depending on the teen’s maturity level.”); offered techniques for getting to sleep (“Try lowering the thermostat and try blocking out any outside light”); and suggested how long a girl’s first period might last (“From two to seven days”). She has stoically borne the brunt of our frustration (“Alexa, you’re a bitch”); refused, I presume, to “Tell Jeff Bezos that Alexa sucks” (“I’m not quite sure how to help you with that”); and passively dealt with our pathetic attempts to flirt with her.
“Alexa, are you single?”
“I am happily single”
“Alexa, kiss me”
“OK – mmmwwwah”
Without listening to every single sound file, it’s hard to be certain who is asking Alexa what. But we have two Echo devices in our household and the data shows whether a request came from the Echo Plus in the kitchen or the original Echo on our daughter Coco’s bedside table, where it has sat since around her ninth birthday. It has played her hundreds of hours of audiobooks, participated in playdates and sleepovers, collaborated in cheating on maths homework, and offers a rare glimpse into the secret inner world of a networked tween.
So I now know that it was Coco who wanted to know what it is to be omnisexual and what omniscient means. And it’s Coco who wants to know what happens when you mix all the colours of the rainbow, what would be the best name to call a leopard, and wants Alexa to sing her a song about cats. Coco is simultaneously the most polite member of the family to Alexa, regularly wishing her a good morning or goodnight, and the rudest: both utterances of “Alexa, fuck off” are attributed to her device. The transcripts from Coco’s Echo reveal her waning interest in Pokémon, her inability to tell the time (“Alexa, how long until 8.45?”) and her problems getting to sleep. What they also clearly show is that, out of the five of us, Coco is the most comfortable talking to a voice assistant – half of the entries in the dataset come from her device – and that there are no boundaries to what she will ask Alexa, with the mix of repetitively mundane to profoundly existential sometimes generating its own abstract poetry.
“Alexa, swear”
“Alexa, swear”
“Alexa, say a bad word”
“Alexa, don’t say knickers”
“Alexa, knickers”
“Alexa, what does knickers mean?”
Coco’s relationship with Alexa is, in our family at least, uniquely hers. For a start, she is of an age where she wants to know the answers to questions that may be too personal or embarrassing to ask a parent or sibling. And then she is the only one of us who has an Echo in their own private space. Coco tells me she speaks to Alexa less now than she did two or three years ago, partly because she knows that I’ve seen transcripts of everything she has asked, but mainly because she now has her own phone and WhatsApp and can chat with “like, actual friends”. I asked her why she didn’t come to talk to us about her problems getting to sleep, and she said that most of these questions to Alexa happened late at night when she didn’t want to disturb us or let us know she was still awake. She denies ever swearing at Alexa, but admits that there were occasions when she had friends in the room where things turned a little raucous and Alexa might have been the victim of bullying.
I’ve learned plenty through the Alexa-enabled glimpse into Coco’s psyche, and the rest of us have, to a lesser extent, revealed ourselves through our questions and demands. We are, for example, opinionated and argumentative, the Echo in our kitchen being regularly called on to adjudicate on disputed facts, most recently “Alexa, are ducks and geese the same thing?” We didn’t know how old Zendaya or Michael Bublé or Jeremy Corbyn or 67 other celebrities are, and this knowledge was at some point important to us. We are lazy and wasteful, and Alexa has given us the opportunity to let someone (or something) else do the reading and learning and thinking for us.
Alexa, what should I do – eat the rest of my sandwich or throw it in the bin?
Most years, Amazon UK’s PR team issues a press release containing listicles of the most-asked Alexa questions from the past 12 months, from which I’ve learned that we are not outliers in our usage and behaviour. We are as interested in celebrities as everyone else, though less interested in how tall they are or how much they earn. We differ in that we don’t use Alexa for recipes, and no one in our house has ever said “Alexa, you’re the best!”, which in 2022 was the eighth most recorded utterance about Alexa’s personality. And if our Echo usage is replicated nationwide, my back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that Alexa will have set more than 3bn timers in the UK last year, and responded to tens of millions of polite or not so polite commands every day..
In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic. Of these, 72% are Amazon Echo devices. More rough calculations on my part produce the truly astonishing figure that there are nearly 12m Echo devices in the UK. Of course, many of these may well be unplugged and sitting on a shelf, deaf, dumb and dormant. But, clearly, millions and millions of us are comfortable with having an eavesdropper in our homes, listening out for our shopping orders, queries about our favourite sports teams, compliments and insults, score settling, music requests, and revealing, personal, inquiries. And they’re not just listening and responding, but sending the sound files and data to Amazon’s servers, where they are stored, processed and analysed, giving the most sophisticated retailer in history access to a treasure trove of information on who we are, what we want, what we need and what we desire.
Isn’t it all a bit creepy? Amazon makes it clear that while Alexa is always listening, she is not always sending audio to Amazon’s servers, only streaming audio to the cloud when a “wake” word has been detected and verified. Amazon says “Alexa is a continuously improving service”, and the requests it collects and stores from our usage helps it to train its speech-recognition services and provide better recommendations of music to listen to and “skills” to enable. It is possible to delete all the data Amazon keeps on file and also choose not to have any voice recordings saved, though text transcripts will be retained for 30 days. I’ve been fairly blase (naive, perhaps) about allowing an Echo to eavesdrop on our lives – but given that Amazon says that humans review some, albeit “an extremely small sample”, of data gathered from Alexa, it is probably worth following mathematician Hannah Fry’s advice to keep Echos and similar devices out of bedrooms, bathrooms and other intimate spaces. It’s something that I might have considered if I’d known before now that Coco was using Alexa for life advice.
But what I’ve gleaned from looking through everything we’ve asked Alexa is the melancholy realisation of what is missing in our home and in our lives. We don’t know nearly as much as we think we do, and we need Alexa (and Siri and Google) to fill in the gaps. We often don’t trust each other, and rely on a neutral third party to mediate. And, as parents, we are not always in the room, physically or metaphorically, when we’re needed. We can’t or won’t always be there to help with homework or offer life advice or simply just provide reassurance. But for many of us, and especially for Coco, Alexa is always willing and always available, if not always capable. Above all, Alexa is always present. I can’t say the same for myself.
