WashU Expert: Your smart speaker data is used in ways you might not expect

“Hey, Alexa, play the latest Taylor Swift album.” Smart speakers offer amazing convenience — from playing your favorite tunes to re-ordering toilet paper — with only a simple voice command. But that convenience can come with a steep cost in privacy that many consumers aren’t even aware they’re paying.

Hey Siri, Can You Hear Me? #ASA184

At the 184th ASA Meeting, Georgia Zellou and Michelle Cohn of the University of California, Davis will describe experiments to investigate how speech and comprehension change when humans communicate with AI. They examined how people adjust their voice when communicating with an AI system compared to talking with another human and, on the listening side, how what a device sounds like impacts how well listeners will understand it.