亞馬遜的新專利,可能讓智能音箱隨時監聽你講話

A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company's smart speaker systems.

最近公佈的亞馬遜的專利申請，因爲該公司智能音箱系統的預想升級引發了關於隱私問題的擔憂。

This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence.

這項功能的改變意味着在默認情況下，音箱會監聽並記錄一切你在它附近所說的話。

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant system that runs on the company's Echo series of smart speakers, works by listening out for a 'wakeword' that tells the device to turn on its extended speech recognition systems in order to respond to spoken commands.

Alexa是亞馬遜用在該公司Echo系列智能音箱上的虛擬輔助系統，它會通過聽“喚醒詞”來控制音箱開啓擴展語音識別系統來對語音指令做出反應。

On Amazon's devices, the wakeword is 'Alexa', but similar systems control how Apple devices work ('Hey Siri') and also Google's ('Hey Google'), not to mention products from other tech companies.

亞馬遜音箱的喚醒詞是“Alexa”，還有類似的系統控制着蘋果設備（“Hey Siri”），谷歌也有（“Hey Google”），很多其他科技公司的產品都有。

In theory, Alexa-enabled devices will only record what you say directly after the wakeword, which is then uploaded to Amazon, where remote servers use speech recognition to deduce your meaning, then relay commands back to your local speaker.

理論上來說由Alexa啓動的設備只能對你說完“喚醒詞”之後馬上說的話進行錄音，然後上傳到亞馬遜，遠程服務器再利用語音識別來推斷你的意思，然後將指令傳回本地音箱。

But one issue in this flow of events, as Amazon's recently revealed patent application argues, is it means that anything you say before the wakeword isn't actually heard.

但亞馬遜最近公佈的專利申請中說，這一系列操作中有一個問題，那就是你在說出喚醒詞之前所說的話其實並未被錄音。

"A user may not always structure a spoken command in the form of a wakeword followed by a command (eg. 'Alexa, play some music')," the Amazon authors explain in their patent application, which was filed back in January, but only became public last week.

專利申請1月份就已提交，上週才公之於衆。亞馬遜負責人在專利申請中解釋說：“用戶給出語音指令時不可能總是先說出喚醒詞然後再發出指令（如‘Alexa，播放音樂’）”。

"Instead, a user may include the command before the wakeword (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa') or even insert the wakeword in the middle of a command (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa, the Beatles please'). While such phrasings may be natural for a user, current speech processing systems are not configured to handle commands that are not preceded by a wakeword."

“用戶反而可能會先說指令，再說喚醒詞（如‘播放音樂，Alexa’），或者甚至在指令之間說喚醒詞（如‘播放音樂，Alexa，請播放甲殼蟲樂隊的歌’）。雖然對用戶來說這樣很自然，但目前的語音處理系統並沒有這樣的功能，能識別未說喚醒詞就給出的指令。”