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> Though I’m sure most users don’t realize that when Alexa does trigger, she sends the audio to the Amazon mothership, which are then stored/analyzed for an indefinite time.

Additionally, Amazon receives several seconds of audio _before_ the trigger word was used

Edit: I can't find a source for this, but IIRC this was part of the initial Echo roll out, and one of the reasons I decided not to purchase. Perhaps Amazon has changed this so now it only listens and sends data after the wakeword.

It does appear to have been updated: "When you use the wake word, the audio stream includes a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word, and closes once your request has been processed."[0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...




The recorded hotword is sent to allow more sophisticated hosted models to reject false positives.




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