Smart speakers record audio accidentally 19 times a day

SMART speakers record conversations accidentally up to 19 times a day, a study has found.

Digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Echo series, Google Home and Apple Homepod, have become more pervasive in people’s homes in recent years with more than 100 million Alexa devices sold to date.

The devices do not constantly listen to our conversations, but they do activate their microphones up to 19 times a day without users’ permission, according to a study from Northeastern University, in Boston, USA.

The research team played audio from 12 programmes on Netflix in an attempt to trigger accidental “wakes” of the smart speakers.

Apple Homepod and Microsoft’s Cortana activated the most, followed by the Echo Dot Series 2, Google Home mini and Echo Dot Series 3. The range of accidental wakes over a 24-hour period ranged from 1.5 to 19.

The researchers said: “We repeated our experiments 12 times and only 8.44 per cent of activations occurred consistently. This could be due to some randomness in the way smart speakers detect wake words, or the smart speakers may learn from previous mistakes and change the way they detect words.”

Researchers said the speakers were triggered for long enough to record sensitive audio.

Researchers said they will now look to find out how many activations lead to recordings being sent to the cloud, and if cloud providers correctly show all cases of audio recording to its users.