[SavageBeast]

I spent some time taking apart how Alexa must work myself. My thinking on this is guided by the fact that there are only a handful of Wake Words available. Given that there are only 4, I'm thinking the ability to recognize those Wake Words is in firmware on the device (such tech was commercially available back in 1995 when I played with a demo piece of hardware that did just that). Decoding a wake word from a stream of audio locally on the device without making a persistent recording of it or sending a recording off-device is fine with me.

However the more complex parsing of what ever comes after the Wake Word needs to be sent off as an audio stream to some cloud operation for parsing where more horsepower is available. This also seems quite reasonable to me. Sure, it could be done on the device but this would mean a hotter CPU on the device and a generally more expensive Alexa. Certainly no more $29 Echo Dots.

Is Alexa listening all the time? Hell yes it is! Is Alexa recording everything you say, everything you watch on TV, every time the dog barks and sending it back to Amazon for archival? Its possible but consider the economics of storing that much data as audio. Storage is cheap but thats quite a burden. Is AMZN keeping a parsed version of everything it hears from your device and dumping the raw audio version? Its technically possible but again, consider the economics of such a thing.

Not to mention, how many Alexas are going to be sold after someone here posts smoking gun proof Alexa is constantly or even at some batched interval sending off large chunks of data which are in fact full voice recordings?

I'm not going to waste my time on this experiment but anybody who is good with Wireshark could perform an analysis to quickly disprove this whole notion.