Amazon's Chief Echo Device on the Risk of Alexa's Awards

Imagine an always available digital assistant who is friendly, turn off your lights, order from your shopping list, discuss anything from the World Cup to the Japanese anime, and who will also know you cheer up when you I feel blue. It's part of the panoply of delights that Toni Reid, vice president of Amazon, Amazon and Echo, thinks when she considers the future of the smart speaker she's been overseeing since its inception.

It starts with the human element. "What surprised us was how often people asked questions that did not need an answer," Reid told the crowd at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference Fortune in Aspen, Colo Monday. People often share things like expressions of loneliness and frustration, or a romantic desire for "Alexa" herself, as their editorial team spends a lot of time thinking about how the service can respond in a relevant way. "We are working hard to build these" delusions "for the customer experience …. We have taken this approach on a global scale," said Reid

.But the pleasures of this Alexa are not

Reid addressed a recent incident where an Alexa device recorded the private conversation of a woman from Oregon and shared it with her contact list. Private has always been at the top of the list, Reid said, browsing through a list of design elements: The device has a mute button; it lights up to show users that "it 's on. he listens and the owners can review and delete everything that Alexa has recorded by asking or saying .Heck, people can unplug it if they want it. "We have built many backups and he failed, "said Reid.

She understands how this incident makes consumers who have already preoccupied with the confidentiality of the data even more nervous. According to Reid, the data collected by Alexa serves only to improve the speech technology itself, to better understand the consumer's intent. "Nothing else."

Reid has just celebrated his twentieth anniversary in business, a milestone that comes with a gray badge. "To match the gray in my hair," she joked. "We were only a bookstore," she says when she became only 600 employees of Amazon.

Although Amazon has more than half a million employees now, it says that the company works rather like a collection of start-ups. "We can try new things, fail quickly and take an interactive approach," she said. "Alexa was a daring bet that we thought we could do."