Amazon deliberately opened Alexa to every device category to capture pervasive voice data

Evidence

Amazon aggressively opened Alexa to third-party developers in order to expand the assistant’s range of “skills,” such as reading a recipe or ordering a pizza. It also opened its platform to smart-home device makers from lighting systems to dishwashers, turning Alexa into a single voice for controlling your home systems and appliances. In 2015 Amazon announced that Alexa would be sold as a service, known as “Amazon Lex,” enabling any company to integrate Alexa’s brain into its products. Amazon Lex is described as “a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.… Lex enables you to define entirely new categories of products.” As Alexa’s senior vice president explained, “Our goal is to try to create a kind of open, neutral ecosystem for Alexa… and make it as pervasive as we possibly can.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 837

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader surveillance-capitalism reading agenda and the platform/ecosystem economics literature (e.g., how opening platforms maximizes data capture). — connects to: Every Alexa territory expansion increases the voice surplus Amazon extracts — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 839; Home-device privacy policies extract biometric and audio data from entire households — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 741
• SEED: An article angle on ‘the open platform as a surveillance instrument’ — how openness rhetoric masks a data-extraction motive.

Broader Connections

• Home-device privacy policies extract biometric and audio data from entire households #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 741