Amazon is working to make its Echo smart speakers part of
the educational experience for students,
urging colleges and universities to experiment with the device and add it to
their curricula.
The company has already given 1,600 Echo Dots to
engineering students at Arizona State University, Tempe, to gain experience in
voice technology. It created the Amazon Alexa Fund Fellowship to provide students funding to develop courses that utilize the device, plus set
up a multimillion-dollar research competition called the Alexa Prize for developing new ways to use conversational artificial intelligence.
“Amazon’s strategy is much more about establishing Alexa
and the mechanisms and the way that people interact with the virtual world,
almost becoming the front end of the next generation of Internet access,” said
Phil Hill, ed-tech consultant and blogger for e-Literate. “They’re looking to
say, ‘People won’t be doing this much on the browsers anymore, they’re going to
be interacting with natural language and voice, and we want that to go through
us.’”
Utah State University, Logan, started using the
device without any prompting from Amazon, installing an Echo Dot in a classroom
for a visually impaired instructor, who uses it to turn on projectors and lower
screens with voice commands. At Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, an
instructor is using Alexa to expand the vocabulary of students in his computing
and information systems courses.
Of course, not everyone is impressed. A
professor of computer science at Rice University, Houston, views Alexa as more of
a gimmick. There are also privacy concerns since the device listens constantly
for a trigger word when activated.
“It raises the question, OK, you have to say,
‘Alexa, tell me this,’” Hill said. “That doesn’t mean the device is not
listening at all times. It just means it uses the Alexa keyword to trigger a
command. Where does that information go? Does Amazon store it? Does it get
thrown away?”