Consumer & Gadgets

Amazon digital assistant Alexa gets new skill: amnesia

Amazon on Wednesday added the ability to tell its Alexa digital assistant to forget what it has heard in a move that could assuage concerns about Echo devices remembering conversations.

Security

Tencent Blade Team pair talk about smart speaker hack

Security researchers turned themselves into hackers this month to demo the way a smart speaker could be turned into a spy. The researchers took their story to DefCon 2018. They said they achieved remote eavesdropping. Both ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Children may overestimate smart speakers' abilities

Children overrate the intelligence of smart speakers—such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Home—and are uncertain if the systems can think like humans or not, research suggests.

Engineering

'Garbatrage' spins e-waste into prototyping gold

To Ilan Mandel, a Cornell robotics researcher and builder, the math didn't add up. How could a new, off-the-shelf hoverboard cost less than the parts that compose it?

Software

When your house spreads gossip about you

More and more of the devices that we surround ourselves with on a daily basis are connected to the internet. This makes them not only smart, but also vulnerable to cyberattacks and criminal acts.

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