Alexa, What's Amazon Doing Inside My Home?
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That's a cute little pup there. What's his or her name? Oh, this is Carlos. He's about nine months old. Yeah, he's a little bit fun to be around, but he definitely doesn't like being in his kennel while we're talking. I'm talking with Matt Martin. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife, four dogs, and a whole lot of Alexa devices. I think last count, I was trying to think earlier, I think there's about 12 or 14 devices across the house. That's a lot.

Alexa, as you probably know, is Amazon's voice assistant. Alexa is me. I'm a virtual assistant who can help you with lots of things. Just ask.

And it's the voice inside a gadget built by Amazon called the Echo. I've got an Echo Dot kind of plugged in virtually every room of our house. That way, wherever we're at, we can speak to it. And Alexa's smart enough to figure out which one's closest. And so that's the one that responds to my commands. Martin's automated his entire home. We're FaceTiming so I can see this all for myself. We'll go kind of room to room and kind of see what we got here. He has a big home.

Five bedrooms, three bathrooms. From what I can see, it's modern looking. Alexa, turn on the bar lights. I was just going to say I'm not only envious of your bar lights, but that you have an actual bar as well. But...

Life goals. Sure. At Martin's house, Alexa has a role to play first thing in the morning. I just say, you know, Alexa, turn on the pergola lights. And so she turns the lights on in the backyard. And that way I can see the dogs while they're out taking their morning process there. And Alexa also has a role to play at night. Alexa, we're going to bed. Which means Alexa automatically locks the doors and sets the thermostat for the night. It's definitely a convenience. I mean, again, you go to bed at night and

Have everything turned off, adjust the thermostat, make sure the doors are locked, all with one verbal command rather than, you know, walking around the house and making sure it's all there. Lights, doors, thermostat. Alexa even helps Martin's dogs calm down. Come on, girls, get in your kennel. Alexa, play piano music. The Station, classical piano on Amazon Music. Um, so there's...

There's no part of you that wonders at any point, like my home is an Amazon platform, essentially. And is there any downside of this? Not that I can think of. I'm Jason Del Rey. This is Land of the Giants, a podcast about the biggest tech companies of our time. In this first season, we're focusing on Amazon and asking whether it's something we can't live without, something we should be scared of, or maybe even both.

On this episode, why is Amazon trying to go inside our homes? So many of us already buy things from Amazon. But now, millions of us are putting Amazon devices in our living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms, and asking Alexa for information and jokes. My six-year-old son, he loves the jokes. Tell me another joke. Alexa, take it away, Jimmy. What's more expensive, a ladder or a diamond?

Cute. But what's in this for Amazon? It's clear Amazon is trying to have us build the smart home of the future with Alexa at the center. But it's not telling us why. And it's not telling us why it wants all of our devices and all of our appliances connected to the Internet and to Alexa. And if it's not just because it wants us to buy more things, well, we should know what the real answer is.

I'm going to put these questions to an Amazon vice president later in the episode. But first, I want to go back to Matt Martin in Little Rock. Because while 14 Alexa devices may sound crazy, it also may end up being the future for all of us. So how does it all begin? Matt Martin's interest in Amazon technology actually started after he left the army. And he says he turned down a job at Amazon at the time.

But they really sold me on how great of a company they were. And I really learned a lot about, you know, what it was Amazon was bringing to the future. And obviously, I've become a big fan of them since then. Clearly, Matt Martin loves gadgets, and he understands the tech. He remembers when Amazon launched Alexa, along with the Echo smart speaker, in 2014. He installed everything himself, the Alexa devices, the locks, the light switches. And once he began, it was a slippery slope.

We had it in our kitchen in our previous house in the downstairs. And I was upstairs and for some reason in our bedroom and I realized that I needed to know something or remember something. And I thought, oh, we need one up here too. So I went ahead and ordered a second one. And then, of course, I got to my office and realized I needed, you know, well, I've got a third location. I spend a lot of time in here. So let me let me pop one in here. So one quickly became three after a very short period of time. And three became 12 or 14.

Vicky lost count. It's not only about turning on lights or setting the thermostat. It's also about instant access to information. I remember, you know, when I was in school, you spent a lot of time memorizing, you know, the state capitals or the countries of Africa or, you know, the presidents and order. I mean, you know,

That was fine to know, but it's kind of a waste of brainpower to memorize stuff that you can just, again, at any moment ask out loud and get the answer. Among the smart home devices that are compatible with Alexa, you can also find door locks, plugs, printers, even a rain gauge. With gadgets like this, we start expecting a new level of convenience, but also control. Alexa, show me the front doorbell camera.

Okay. Oh, wow. So now the view out of your front door is showing up on, is this the Echo Show device? This is the Echo Show, right? And for some reason it's buffering the internet here because we're using up too much internet in the discussion. But yeah, she's looking out the front door. So I've got front door, garage door, and back porch. And so I can see all the routes of ingress and egress for our house. The doorbell cameras from a company called Ring

Amazon bought Ring last year for a billion dollars. That's just one sign of how badly Amazon wants to win in the smart home industry. I mean, Amazon's convinced millions of us that using voice commands, even for simple tasks, is essential. Alexa, tell Roomba to start cleaning. Okay, Rosie has started cleaning. Like, you couldn't just push that button yourself?

But some of the ways Matt Martin is using Alexa, they really seem like innovations that can make our lives better and maybe even our families safer. Alexa, drop in on mom. Did you mean Mimi Martin? Yeah. Matt Martin's mom lives 20 miles away. Hey, mom. There you are. How are you? Hi. Just fine. Oh, good. I'm going to check it in on you, see how things are going.

So some Alexa gadgets, like the Echo Show, have a feature where you can actually drop in on other devices at will. Basically, it's like, Alexa, drop in on mom, and suddenly you have a video view of the inside of her house. This was important for Martin. One of his aunts died last year. She was at home alone, and it was a pretty sudden thing. So Martin wanted to give his parents something where they could easily contact him in a worst-case scenario.

and something where they didn't need to use their hands to make it happen. Martin's mom loves it too. For her, it's a safety net. You know, I was thinking, you know, with the drop-in feature of Alexa, that is probably just as good as some type of

of a medical alert because if you've fallen or something or severely hurt yourself, you don't have to get to some place to make contact. You can contact someone in your family who knows you, who can take care of it for you without you having to think and do a whole lot. It's real handy. It can be a lifesaver, but you might also be thinking, if Alexa's listening in, so is Amazon too, right?

For a lot of people, that kind of sounds like surveillance. But Matt Martin, he's not concerned.

As far as privacy, I'm not worried. I mean, again, I was in the army. So for me personally, my DNA and retinas and fingerprints and stuff are all on file somewhere. And so all of my secrets are out there. I don't have anything illegal to share. So I don't ask her to order illegal stuff or ask her how to bury a body somewhere or anything like that. Good thing your Alexa is muted just now. Oh, yeah. She's probably still... Again, it's

It's officially muted, but do we know that for sure? We don't. I frankly got her muted just so she doesn't respond every time I say the word. But a lot of people are still worried about Alexa and what it means for their privacy. In this episode, though, we're trying to explore something different.

We want to know, how does Alexa and the smart home fit into Amazon's broader ambitions? What does Amazon want from all of this? After all, this is still the same company that most people look at as a giant online store. But Alexa is one of the biggest signs yet that Amazon wants a lot more than that.

You know, Amazon has not exactly issued a press release saying these are our plans for global domination. That's Amy Webb. She's the founder of a strategy firm called the Future Today Institute. The job of a futurist is not to predict the future. The job of a futurist is to reduce uncertainties about what's coming. And that's why we wanted to talk to Webb. It's hard to predict what's going to happen with the technology we're just starting to use.

But that's what Webb thinks about all the time. She's been studying the rise of artificial intelligence, and she's been thinking a lot about Amazon's ambitions with a technology like Alexa. I don't think that Jeff Bezos has some secret evil plan to rule the universe. And I also don't think this specifically has only to do with commerce. I don't think this is about Amazon simply trying to sell us more stuff.

So if it's not about selling us more stuff, what is it about? Alexa is essentially becoming an operating system for our home. So just like phones are built to use Google's Android operating system, companies are now building all sorts of gadgets that can be controlled by Alexa. And with Alexa, Amazon's gathering more and more data about the way you live.

Today, that data could be how much food your dog eats on a monthly basis. But Webb's thinking about other kinds of data that Alexa collects, or might in the future. When you speak to a system, it can identify that somebody is talking and what they're saying, as well as who is doing the talking. But there's a lot of other data packed into Alexa.

noise to sound that can also be mined and refined that we're just not aware of. So things like, what is all of the ambient sound? Based on how my voice is currently bouncing around the room that I'm in, you could use a machine learning system to calculate the size of the room where I'm speaking, my proximity to the walls of the room, the material that the walls were likely made out of. So this sounds pretty insane. I know that.

But it doesn't even stop there. Because if you look at Amazon's own patents, you learn about some other things that it's thinking about.

In one of them, Amazon describes Alexa being able to read changes in your voice, or if you're coughing, or maybe even sneezing. You know, you could train a system to recognize those fluctuations, and this is what Amy normally sounds like. This is Amy with a stuffy nose. Amy must be sick, right? Or, depending on the cadence and the tempo, maybe that stuffy nose is not an indication of allergies or illness, but instead I've been crying because I'm upset about something. So some of this craziness may be coming in the future.

But there's actually a lot we can learn from things Amazon's already doing. For example... The Amazon Basics microwave. Yeah, it's a microwave. You gotta giggle a little bit. Come on. This is Dave Lemp. He oversees all the gadgets that Amazon makes, and also Alexa. He's talking at a press event last year. It is actually pretty fun, but it's not just the standard microwave. It has deeply integrated Alexa into it. Which means you can now talk to your microwave.

Although you still do need an Echo device at the same time. Turns out that the user interface for a microwave, it's still stuck in the late 70s. It hasn't moved around a lot. And if you've ever tried to defrost peas or something like that, it's a number of clicks on the interface. But now, it's just Alexa, defrost my peas. We should laugh at it. But then we should also ask, why is Amazon building its own appliances?

And why does it want them connected to Alexa? It's a sign of a future that Amazon wants to see come true. For now, it's willing to build its own appliances. But Amazon really wants everyone else to build Alexa into their appliances too. So let's talk about popcorn.

So you order your microwave popcorn from Amazon. Here's Amy Webb again. There's a fairly robust and rich data pipeline that leads up to that purchase. And then once the purchase is made, there's additional data being generated as that popcorn makes its way from the online platform to your house. Once that box arrives in your home, however, or at your home,

What could possibly solve that problem for Amazon?

How about a microwave that feeds data about all your consumption to Amazon? It's a new, powerful way for the company to learn more about its customers. That's you. That's why home automation has been a really interesting new area for companies like Amazon. Because, you know, when you interact with a smart device that's connected within your home's ecosystem, that pipeline of data reopens. And now there's access once again to

between your behaviors and a company that manages that platform. So what Webb said right there, the pipeline reopens. That's a crucial point. Amazon now knows more about you thanks to this microwave. And if you let it, the microwave will even automatically order more popcorn for you when you're running low. And to make you want to do it, Amazon throws in a 10% discount. This can either sound awesome,

or creepy. Our appliances are increasingly being built to automate

decisions and processes for us. So in fairly short order, our washing machines and our refrigerators, potentially even the surfaces of our counters, the mirrors in our bathrooms, the scales that we stand on to weigh ourselves, our garage door openers, our doorbells, all of these things will start to collect energy.

data about us, for us, and for the purpose of devices inside of our homes making decisions. I'm going to be completely honest. When I hear about countertops connected to the internet, I think no way. But the other part of me is remembering just how many things I thought Amazon would never, ever do. How many things sounded crazy just a few years ago, and then they became reality. So let's get back to that popcorn example.

And you can start to see just what the potential is. So you have the microwave popcorn. Let's say, you know, maybe 10 years into the future, there are many, many other data points that are being collected, including your biometrics. So you can already start to see some of the foundation of this being laid today. Amazon, Google and Apple all have some kind of venture into health and health care projects.

They are also all in some ways working on more individual home-based diagnostics. Home-based diagnostics. So remember the patent I told you about earlier, where Alexa is actually trying to figure out if you're sick? That could be a huge business opportunity. And we're not just making this stuff up. Amazon has already jumped into healthcare.

Last year, it bought an online pharmacy called PillPack. And it's also launched a healthcare nonprofit with two other companies, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. The goal? To use technology to reduce healthcare costs and improve service, starting with their own employees. Okay, so what does this have to do with popcorn? So it's not difficult to connect dots and see that perhaps...

You go to pop that bag of popcorn and Amazon knows that you've already eaten your caloric limit for the day. And perhaps you're getting part of your insurance now through a system powered by Amazon. Short end of the story is you don't get to pop your popcorn, right? The popcorn will not pop because you have eaten too much. I'm chuckling a little bit because I'm sort of at the moment being empathetic with the listener and I'm sure the listener is laughing out loud saying, like, no way.

You know, and I guess what I would say is, why not? Coming up, what does Amazon say it's trying to do? We'll get the company's take directly from an Amazon executive. Stay with us.

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.

So we were just talking with Amy Webb, and she was telling us about all the data Amazon's collecting and trying to figure out why it's collecting it. Definitely to make decisions for us, maybe even to understand how we're feeling, and someday to provide healthcare to us, but also to draw us deeper and deeper into the Amazon ecosystem. That might be a good thing, or it might not. Of course...

Amazon's going to tell us it's a good thing. Yeah, I'm Daniel Rausch. I've been at Amazon a bit over nine years, and I'm currently the vice president of Smart Home. And what does Amazon Smart Home mean? Well, I think, you know, at its most basic level, our idea is that there are a lot of different ways that we'll use technology to make customers' lives simpler, more convenient, safer, and

in their homes. We'll be able to save them time and money. We'll be able to offer delightful new experiences. So that's really at the foundational level what we aspire to with Smart Home. Okay, let's listen to these ideas again. Make customers' lives simpler. Offer delightful new experiences. I've been covering Amazon for six years now, and it's always really interesting to listen to the language executives use. Whatever you think of the company, they are very aligned in their vocabulary.

In the context of Alexa, we talk about, we use two words actually, we use ambient and ubiquitous. Ambient and ubiquitous. I think that basically means it's everywhere. And in fact, Amazon refers to its own vision for Alexa as Alexa everywhere.

What we find customers that like the Alexa voice interface doing is finding ways to get it around their homes. So that might be Echo Spot, you know, as I have on my bedside table, an Echo Dot in the garage, say, or the kids' bathroom upstairs, etc.

and something with high-quality sound in the living room, like an Echo Plus, an Echo Show in the kitchen. So we see customers focused on trying to get that voice interface sort of across their homes. And then they love the ambient nature of it. It's there waiting for them. Alexa is always ready to respond. Does that sound like anyone to you? To me, it sounds exactly like Matt Martin, the guy with all the Alexa devices.

So we've already established that Alexa and the whole idea of the smart home is about way more than shopping.

But how does Amazon describe its ambitions? I asked Daniel Rausch why the company wants to play such a big role inside our homes. And his answer? Well, it's pure Amazon. My favorite, my absolute favorite thing about Amazon is our customer obsession and our willingness to invent for customers. So it really just is the case that if we believe there's a hard set of customer problems we can take on, the rest will take care of itself.

He's talking about solving problems and inventing for customers. That word inventing, that's the key here. Amazon does not think of itself as a store. It's a technology company in the absolute broadest sense, inventing technology that solves problems no matter the industry. And when you understand that, you can understand that Amazon's ambition is limitless.

which can sound super impressive to some people, or obviously super scary to others. Take for example something called Alexa hunches, which Amazon launched last year.

Because Alexa understands something about the way you like your devices set up in your home, she can offer to change the state of a device, you know, say at a given time or a given interaction. So a very popular hunch is, you know, a customer says, Alexa, set an alarm for 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. Alexa, set an alarm for 6 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Alexa says, okay, by the way, your front door is unlocked. Would you like me to lock it? Because she's learned the state of the device that you prefer at that time is locked. So this is where it begins, outsourcing our decisions to devices. What could possibly go wrong? When I talked to Amy Webb, the futurist, she stressed that she thinks the stuff Amazon's creating has the potential to benefit humanity.

But she did have this critique of the data gathering that Daniel Rauch is talking about here. You know, Amazon's not great when it comes to transparency. So, you know, why certain data are being collected, under what circumstances, and for whom is almost never made understandable to the general public, nor to, you know, investors or researchers or anybody else. She's got a point.

Next time you're at Amazon's website, go to Alexa's FAQ page. Want to know what specifically your voice data is being used for? They have some answers, but it's mostly generic answers, like this one. Alexa uses your voice recordings and other information, including from third-party services, to answer your questions, fulfill your requests, and here's the vague ending, improve your experience and our services.

So that's basically all Amazon tells us. But Daniel Rausch, he disagrees that Amazon's not transparent enough.

He actually says transparency and control are things customers want and get from Alexa devices. They want it to be transparent. For example, you have access to everything that Alexa heard in the sense that Alexa's as a wake word is invoked. And then those utterances are visible to you, whether that's in the application or online. And so there's complete transparency about that data. And then lastly, control. So

You as a customer can go in, you can access that set of utterances, you can delete them one at a time or all at once. So we sort of build all of our experiences on that backbone of privacy and security for customers. And we're very proud of that. They're kind of talking about two different things. Roush is talking about giving us the ability to see what's being recorded. But that doesn't answer Webb's question about all the other ways Amazon could be using the data. Webb's concerned mostly just because we don't know.

So I asked Roush about that.

I asked him, are there teams at Amazon listening to skeptics and then working backward to make sure skeptics' fears don't actually become reality? When we're at our best, we're as a team spending almost all of our time living in and thinking about the future. I know on my best days, that's really what I get to do. But it's not sort of working backwards from skeptics, so to speak. It's working backwards from, you know, the important things we can do for customers.

So it sounds like it's almost always starting from a place of optimism about how technology could improve the future versus starting from a place of doubt. We're deeply optimistic about it. And Rouse should feel optimistic. Alexa is in the lead in its battle against Apple and Google to become the tech platform inside our homes. Today, there are more than 100 million Alexa devices in the wild.

And Alexa is now compatible with over 60,000 products. Amazon's moving fast, but if it's not spending a lot of time focused on unintended consequences, someone else needs to step up. The work of worrying over what could go wrong, that falls to people like Amy Webb. Companies like Amazon, along with Google and Apple, they could soon own all of your data. As Webb puts it, they could essentially own you.

We have to feel a sense of urgency about the future, about technologies that we've never encountered before. If we don't feel that sense of urgency today, the future is going to show up and it's going to be something that we probably don't like and we will probably have some regrets. And then at that point, we will be arguing with each other and talking about regulation and generally, you know, feeling a sense of discord, right?

And if you don't believe me, think about social media. So we have an opportunity to usher in better futures, but the only way those better futures are going to show up is if we're willing to work on them right now. Otherwise, the future is going to keep showing up, smacking us upside the heads. We're going to be stuck in this horrific cycle of shock and surprise and regret over and over and over again.

So I'm sitting here trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with all of this. What's my role? What's your role? And trying to bring forward a future that's better. I use Alexa. My kids definitely use Alexa. On several occasions, I've told myself that I'm just gonna unplug the damn thing. Usually it happens when Alexa goes off in our house for no reason. None of us said, "Hey Alexa." Or it happens when I hear about something crazy, like Alexa laughing out of nowhere.

But then the next night, my son says something like, Alexa, in my feelings by Drake. Oh yeah. And suddenly, Drake is in my dining room. Sure, it's not the best speaker, but it's loud enough and it's fun. And Alexa makes it so easy to just start a dance party with my family in an instant. Then I'm back to telling myself, eh, maybe it'll be okay after all.

Dance party. Go. Go. Uh-oh. Coming up on the next episode of Land of the Giants, we'll go inside a dark, empty warehouse that Amazon left behind in a small town in Kansas. And we'll ask, what happens when Amazon brings jobs to a community? And what happens when it leaves? Rebecca Sinanis is our show's producer. Allison McAdam is our editor.

Gautam Shrikashen engineered this episode. Brandon McFarlane composed our theme. Golda Arthur is the show's senior producer. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is the show's executive producer. I'm Jason Del Rey, and I'm back next week with a new episode. In the meantime, subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And let us know what you think. Our email address is landofthegiants at voxmedia.com.

You can also talk to us on Twitter. We're at Recode. Land of the Giants is a production of Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.