&gt; Sure I believe Amazon when they say they only send clips of the actual commands<p>I worked on speech parsing software at Audible, where much of the data was originally gathered to make Alexa and the Echo possible.<p>They are not telling the truth when they say that they only send clips of the actual commands.<p>EDIT:<p>This is not to say that they constantly stream audio data, either. But they send much more than just the voice extractions of the commands themselves. They have to in order to build a profile of the users&#x27; voices, habits, etc., which aid in the quick processing of incoming speech data.<p>The service is not selective enough to only pick up on voice information proceeded by a correct utterance of &quot;Alexa.&quot; Amazon is &quot;customer-obsessed&quot; - and one of the product execs asked on a phone call:<p>&gt; I am an Alexa user, and call out her name but stutter slightly. I still intended to say &quot;Alexa,&quot; so why shouldn&#x27;t she respond to me? That&#x27;s a bad user experience. Customers want to be understood, not ignored.<p>This is paraphrased, but the consequences of this question were enormous. It basically ensured that Alexa users would not ever have privacy again.