Increased False Triggers
Sitting over breakfast with family this morning, I noticed that the Echo Show was trigger often — maybe about once a minute. Because I don’t have any trigger tone setup, it wasn’t immediately obvious that the device was listening. What only made it clear was that the screen had lit up with a listening graphic.
This increased my suspicious that since the rollout of Alexa Cloud Verification, Amazon has loosened the threshold for local triggering. Why wouldn’t it? A false trigger, especially if there isn’t a loud acknowledgement or an undesired response, is not annoying and infinitely less annoying than a false rejection. “ALEXA!!! HELLO??”
There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to adjust the trigger sensitivity on Echo devices. It would be great to get some feedback on the false trigger rate, just to make sure that the device isn’t gaslighting me or trying to encourage me to interact at specific times or when it detects something that it would want me to engage with it on. More transparency is better, especially when dealing with a literal black box of a product.
