IoT technology is ever-evolving, and the concept of a smart home is gaining widespread adoption in various countries. With changing consumer behaviour and trends, buyers are now very thoughtful about their investments, especially when it comes to buying a home. They are now looking forward to an integrated or connected home in place of a traditionally built home. A majority of people are looking to upgrade their homes with smart solutions that will allow them to operate/access, control and monitor everything at the tap on the screen.
However, like every coin has two sides, apprehensions associated with some of these smart devices or products cannot be ignored. E.g. Smart Voice Assistants, say, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and some of the other assistants, smart speakers have been under heavy scrutiny on the privacy front. Today, we will delve into this particular topic of privacy concerns around voice assistants and smart speakers.
Are these voice assistants hearing everything that is going around? Who is all listening in? Can these smart speakers and assistants be hacked? When personal information and privacy are at stake, it is crucial to know how these smart devices work and how you can stay protected, maintaining your privacy as you need to.
Let us first talk about Voice Assistants. What are they?
To describe in simple words, Voice assistants are voice-controlled helpers – they listen and respond to voice commands – a digital assistant that uses voice recognition software, natural language processing (NLP), speech synthesis and such other software that does the job.
The speakers have a microphone to ‘hear’, to communicate back to us or, even play music. It is IoT dishing you an assistant who will anticipate your every need, respond to every command and do as told!
Voice commands are used to prompt different home activities, from turning on and off lights at a specific time, playing music, setting door locks, and monitoring appliances in the home. They can be customised to your needs. Some of the common tasks that most voice assistants in the market provide are maintaining/alerting reminders, sending messages, dial calls, answering questions, playing music, giving weather forecasts, creating calendar entries, setting task lists, and setting alarms/ timers, to name a few.
They have these and many more practical uses in homes, offices and businesses. It is upto the user to optimise the use of the smart device. They offer undoubtedly a high level of convenience, comfort, cost savings and, overall, improve the quality of life. Smart connected homes are the future, and voice assistants are an integral part of it all!
Coming to the common concerns or apprehensions – there are two major ones if we are to pinpoint.
- They are listening. All the time.
- They are, in a way, a hub or portal to everything else around the home. They are connected to various devices and privy to much personal information – vulnerability to hacking.
Voice Assistants, Smart Speakers, collect a great deal of data about you. The major apprehensions ( as seen above) for most smart home dwellers using this web-connected device are Data Privacy and Security.
People are increasingly sceptical about how advanced technology or, say, artificial intelligence collects and shares their data. This feeling certainly extends to Voice Assistants too.
The ‘always-on smart speakers’ are right there in your living space to hear you and your words. Using wake words such as ‘Alexa’, ‘Siri’ or ‘Cortana’ or whatever the name for your assistant, in a random conversation with a family member or friend may record or send an undesired voice command.
In simple words, triggering the keywords designed to ‘activate’ the voice assistant can be sensitive. You may accidentally engage the assistant and lead to inadvertently recording vast amounts of data in the background. E.g. talking about bank details, using PINs to confirm online purchases, reading emails or accessing contacts.
However, though Data Privacy and security are hurdles with Smart Speakers, they can be overcome. If you are a Smart Homeowner, keeping a close eye on how your data is used can help.
To understand how once can address these concerns (which are very much controllable and manageable), it is essential to understand how the assistant actually works. This, in itself, will clarify and clear the questions clouding the mind.
How does a voice assistant work?
And in the context of our discussion today – is someone listening in on your conversations and commands?
Smart speakers are integrated with voice assistants. And voice assistants work on voice recognition technology. Voice recognition software uses the spoken words, breaks them down into sound bytes, digitising them, analysing them for patterns/ familiarity and thus, ‘understand’ the user. It is built to recognise human language and speech. Over time it creates its own repository, from analysed patterns and matures – gets better at understanding its user over time.
This tech is what makes your smart speaker understand what you are saying, respond to your command and help you control all connected smart devices. You can simply speak the command, use the trigger words or ‘wake’ words, and you can consider the job done.
Now comes the questions, is it always listening, and who else is listening-in?
For the voice assistant to be ready and start responding to your ‘wake’ word, it does need to be always on and listening. It is continually analysing audio snippets to look for the wake word. This process of keeping a check for the wake word is something that happens internally, within the device. And when the word is not there, these snippets are deleted.
Now, as mentioned earlier, if it spots the wake word, it starts recording – even if you didn’t mean to actually say the word in the context of wanting to use the assistant!
All major players in this segment do have their employees listen to samples to better their voice recognition technology. The nuances here are aplenty, from language style to accents, everyday phrases and so on. However, they have all assured that these are done with enough measures, including voice distortion, among others, to maintain privacy on account of these limited test samples.
Here are some tips and tricks to help you control Data and Privacy while using Smart Speakers.
Having spoken of how the technology works, what benefits it offers and what the common apprehensions are, let us hand out some simple measures that can be taken at the user level to ensure that you stay protected.
- Choose and integrate your speaker to other smart devices wisely.
Your voice assistant is, in many ways, a hub connecting you to all other smart devices in the house. It could be your smart sensor, smart lock, camera, lights, thermostat and more. Be selective in your choice. An informed decision here would be wise. Once you pair it, do check in now and then!
E.g. Set the security alarm when pairing Robot vacuums with voice assistants to access the map of your home. Delink address books and calendar, too, perhaps.
- Turn off active listening. Or quite simply, turn off the microphone. Look for settings to ‘Mute’ your device.
Do that if you are amidst a sensitive conversation, so it’s no longer listening! You can also activate ‘Alerts’ that let you know when the voice assistant is actively listening.
- Review and delete records voice commands periodically.
Say, make a habit of understanding how your data is used. Look at the history and delete old recordings on a daily basis, say once every week. You can also set your Voice Assistant to auto-delete the recordings at set time intervals.
- Secure your home WiFi network by using strong, unique passwords.
Make sure your password has at least twelve characters, a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. You should avoid common words, phrases, or information while setting the same. Also, avoid the usage of existing passwords from other personal/professional accounts.
- Use multi-factor authentication
When you enable multi-factor authentication, the user needs both – your password and an additional piece of information. E.g. a code sent to your phone or email Id or generated from any third-party app. Adding this layer of protection makes it harder to hack the account, even when a hacker gets your password.
- Check the privacy policy.
The default settings of some Voice Assistants record and send data to the manufacturer in order to help them research and understand the product better. However, ensuring the installation of Voice Command Encryption secures and protects personal data from such circumstances and gives you full control over how your audio recordings are handled and who can listen to them.
- Check for and install software updates.
Stay updated! New features and updates actually make Smart Assistants useful and more convenient to use.
- Be careful about your shares.
While using your voice assistant, do stay conscious of the information you are sharing. As mentioned in the earlier sections, do avoid giving out sensitive information like PINs, passwords, security identity number, credit card/ bank details and such.
- Stay clued in on notification emails and messages.
This is very important. In most cases, once the configurations are in place, we tend to forget about it and move on with life. That is, in fact, the whole point of smart home integration! But having said that, it is in your personal interest to stay on top of notifications that come. Do read before you dismiss the message! While most may be customary messages, you don’t want to regret not having read that one message which could have saved you from a twisted plot!
- Use ‘voice recognition’!
Do configure your own voice if your device allows it! This would ensure that your voice assistant responds only to your voice command and not anyone else. This is something that may not always work, but most definitely something to try out.
There are privacy policies set up, in line with government rules, to check how these technologies are offered. Before companies bring these out to market, several rounds of checks happen to ensure that privacy is respected. Having said that, good faith apart, as users, there are these multiple measures that you can take to stay aware and protected.
Smart home technology is here to stay and is the future. It is upto us to adopt it in a way that brings in a better quality of life while staying safe. There are bespoke solution providers who can help you set up an integrated home in the most secure way possible while ensuring your comfort and convenience. Get yourself a smart home automation partner to approach this in a structured, secure way.
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