Wisdom Wednesday: No, your smart speaker isn’t always listening.

A short piece of hump day reading this week for Wisdom Wednesday from Simon Willison on his blog, where he makes an argument that I’ve made often that the machines probably aren’t listening to what we say (at least for the purpose of targeted advertising!). Long time readers will know I’ve made this point before and Simon summarises it well, pointing out that the effort involved just wouldn’t be worth it given other ways that these companies have access to our data.

I often mention to my students that Google and Amazon have so much data on us from hardware devices, search history and other things that they don’t need an always on microphone. And as Simon says, don’t forget that if this came out it would be nothing but pain for these companies, making it very much not worth the effort! Basically, when you see they are promoting ‘lawn mowers’ to you it’s probably because of a search or an evaluation of your finances or even just confirmation bias, and not them listening!

But as always interested in your thoughts, do you have a smart speaker and do you think it’s listening? I suspect for many no commentary is ever going to convince them, but I’d love to know what others think. Happy hump day all!

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/