Petra, a 4-year-old African gray Congo parrot, has figured out how to manage the lighting in her Orlando home using a smart speaker. "Alexa, all lights on," she'll say when the mood strikes. Then, "Alexa, all lights off."
This ought to be encouraging for the rest of us who are sometimes reluctant to try new technologies: If a bird can learn, we can learn!
The parrot seems to appreciate the empowerment the device offers. "Alexa, I love you," Petra says in one video.
Petra's owner says the parrot can speak more than 300 words and is now conquering the operation of Google Home. She reportedly has Alexa and Google Home talking to each other. So conceivably the bird could use smart-connected appliances to fire up the oven, brew pots of coffee, and reset the air conditioning. Not necessarily when such appliances are needed, however. But once you start messing around with voice commands, it's hard to stop.
Other than entertaining a smart bird, what else can smart speakers do? A creepy yet conceivably useful function is shared in Saturday's On Computers feature in the business section of Arkansas' Newspaper. That's where columnists Bob and Joy Schwabach reveal that the Amazon Echo smart speaker not only listens to you, it listens for you.
"If someone turns on its voice calling and messaging feature, you can either call them or listen in. ... This is a lot like spying," the columnists report. "You can drop in on a friend's home if they have an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot or Echo Show." The Show, it's pointed out, comes with a video camera, "so you can see as well as hear."
This could be helpful in keeping an eye on the elderly or sickly and in monitoring a vacationing friend's household. But privacy concerns may keep this concept from climbing to the top of your wish list. Sure, you can disconnect from the system with a voice command. But what if you forget to do so? Do you really want others to eavesdrop on you while you're arguing with your kid, complaining about something/everything to the cable company, watching embarrassingly bad TV shows, or making slurpy noises while eating soup?
To be fair to these ingenious devices, there must be agreements between two parties to allow access, "because otherwise you are bugging their house without bothering to get a judge's order," write the columnists.
Still, it's one thing to ask Alexa to turn the lights on/off, to play 1989's "She Drives Me Crazy" by the Fine Young Cannibals, to read an audiobook, to tell your smart dog feeder to dish up dinner for your English cream golden retriever because your flight is delayed, or soothe a fretful toddler with a bedtime story. It's quite another to use it to hang around--invited or not--in someone else's living space.
You don't have to be a Luddite to pass on this advancement. Just say no. Alexa will understand.
Editorial on 05/23/2018