On Thursday, Amazon announced a new program called Alexa for Residential that would make it cheaper for apartment complexes to integrate Alexa and Amazon devices into their rental units. This should come as no surprise, especially considering that the pandemic has allowed Amazon to grow even more entrenched in our daily lives.
Before you move in, a smart speaker will be installed that will need no set-up from you—it can even give you a tour before you move in and answer questions about the rental unit. According to The Verge, Amazon insists property managers won’t access any tenant data and all voice recordings will be deleted daily, all in the name of offering “custom voice experiences that go beyond the walls of their apartments.”
Since its introduction in late 2014, Amazon has increasingly integrated Alexa into its vast empire and beyond. In 2019, 100 million devices were sold with Alexa integration, and many of them weren’t even Amazon devices. Later that year, a New Yorker feature on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his company reported that “fifty million homes” had an Amazon Echo device—the most popular voice-activated speaker that carried Alexa.
Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get an Echo or equivalent Alexa-compatible device into as many homes as possible, at a loss according to one analysis, for good reason. Consumers not only spend “billions of dollars” through Alexa, but increasingly integrate it into their lives as time goes on. And it’s through this mass adoption of Alexa devices that consumers (and the army of human beings Amazon hires to listen to consumers) can collectively train Amazon’s voice recognition system, which is then monetized through Amazon’s primary source of profits: Amazon Web Services…
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