Kickstarter Spotlight: Pozio stops accidental assistant actions
Pozio is a voice controlled device that sits above your smart speaker and basically gives it sonic earmuffs until you ask the Pozio to stop. I’ve had a pre-release version of this in my house now since June under embargo, and while I am still under review embargo for another two weeks until the kickstarter goes live, consider this an item to watch if you have concerns about our useful little wiretaps.
Have you ever been in the middle of a sentence that included something sort of sounded like a smart assistant wakeup word and found your assistant listening, and acting on random words that you happened to say next? It’s happened to me more times than I can count, but I also have a lot of assistants.
Besides accidental actions, there also exists that these little microphones could in theory be utilized by third parties to listen to your house, and we’ve also heard of the ability for bad actors to use lasers to send commands to your assistant asking for doors to be unlocked. There’s also been a lot of incidentally recorded audio in the Amazon echosphere, although this may have been addressed in the past couple of years.
Basically it doesn’t seem like a particularly smart idea to have an assistant listening all the time, especially if your name is Alexa, or OJ Booble.
Anyway, the Kickstarter currently goes live Tuesday November 2nd, 2021 if I’m reading the countdown correctly, and you should check them out. I’ll have a review of my pre-production unit when the embargo lifts.
In the meantime, you can check out slightly more information than I just posted over on the Pozio website.
