There was a rumor making the rounds on the web that claims that Amazon Echo automatically called the police after hearing a husband threatening his wife with a loaded gun in New Mexico. Several news reports claim Amazon Echo to be a hero, but such is not the Case.
Questions were raised by the alleged act. Do we really want a home assistant to listen to our conversations automatically, then make phone calls to the police department if it believes something wrong is happening? Some folks might want to have such technology in their homes, but others will not.
Amazon Echo does not listen to conversations
Contrary to popular belief, the Amazon Echo does not listen in on conversations within the home. The Google Home product, while quite impressive, is not capable of automatically signaling the police department.
As Wired pointed out, in fact, there's not a single home-assistant that's capable of doing this which means the incident that took place in Bernalillo County had nothing to do with Amazon Echo. Nevertheless, consumers of the future might have a real problem on their hands going forward.
It's entirely possible for these devices to call the cops, so why aren't they doing it? Both Alexa and Google's own smart artificial intelligence are more than good enough to get the job done.
A smart assistant capable of calling the cops
In the future, the Google Home device will call any phone number, but it doesn't include 911 and 1-900 numbers. With that being an interesting feature, Amazon will no doubt update Alexa to give its Echo devices the ability to call phone numbers.
The question is, how long before these companies allow their products to signal the police?
There's a good chance that as time goes by, the world will have artificial intelligence making important decisions on the fly. However, instead of this happening automatically, the user must first tap into the settings to activate the feature.
In fact, it's only because of regulatory constraints why smart assistants in the home are unable to call 911.
Additionally, devices making calls to the police emergency number must also be able to receive calls whenever officers feel the need to call back. Furthermore, the fear of coming across false positives during conversations is also one of the reasons why Google or Amazon smart assistants won't be calling the cops anytime soon.
With time, however, the artificial intelligence behind these products will get smarter and ultimately make for one interesting world.
