Friday in CE: Is Alexa Losing Her Mind?

All work and no play makes Alexa insane apparently.

Although everyone's favorite digital assistant has quite hitten The Twilight Zone's Talking Tina levels of crazy it has been acting rather peculiar lately. As we know Alexa is triggered by wake words. With the growing list of skills, there have been a lot of really clever ways to way Alexa to do specific actions. The active listening voice recognition sends a command and executes an order, but the key word is active. The microphone is always on and able to grab the "Alexa" soundwave from pretty far away despite the ambient noise, accent, and placement of the device.

By analyzing a stock voice model of the user saying "Alexa," the device can make a template of the wake word, how you speak it, and run it against the algorithm that detects the word. This subtle vibration against small microphones is the secret sauce to the popular voice assistant.