亚马逊的新专利，可能让智能音箱随时监听你讲话

A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company's smart speaker systems.

最近公布的亚马逊的专利申请，因为该公司智能音箱系统的预想升级引发了关于隐私问题的担忧。

This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence.

这项功能的改变意味着在默认情况下，音箱会监听并记录一切你在它附近所说的话。

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant system that runs on the company's Echo series of smart speakers, works by listening out for a 'wakeword' that tells the device to turn on its extended speech recognition systems in order to respond to spoken commands.

Alexa是亚马逊用在该公司Echo系列智能音箱上的虚拟辅助系统，它会通过听“唤醒词”来控制音箱开启扩展语音识别系统来对语音指令做出反应。

On Amazon's devices, the wakeword is 'Alexa', but similar systems control how Apple devices work ('Hey Siri') and also Google's ('Hey Google'), not to mention products from other tech companies.

亚马逊音箱的唤醒词是“Alexa”，还有类似的系统控制着苹果设备（“Hey Siri”），谷歌也有（“Hey Google”），很多其他科技公司的产品都有。

In theory, Alexa-enabled devices will only record what you say directly after the wakeword, which is then uploaded to Amazon, where remote servers use speech recognition to deduce your meaning, then relay commands back to your local speaker.

理论上来说由Alexa启动的设备只能对你说完“唤醒词”之后马上说的话进行录音，然后上传到亚马逊，远程服务器再利用语音识别来推断你的意思，然后将指令传回本地音箱。

But one issue in this flow of events, as Amazon's recently revealed patent application argues, is it means that anything you say before the wakeword isn't actually heard.

但亚马逊最近公布的专利申请中说，这一系列操作中有一个问题，那就是你在说出唤醒词之前所说的话其实并未被录音。

"A user may not always structure a spoken command in the form of a wakeword followed by a command (eg. 'Alexa, play some music')," the Amazon authors explain in their patent application, which was filed back in January, but only became public last week.

专利申请1月份就已提交，上周才公之于众。亚马逊负责人在专利申请中解释说：“用户给出语音指令时不可能总是先说出唤醒词然后再发出指令（如‘Alexa，播放音乐’）”。

"Instead, a user may include the command before the wakeword (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa') or even insert the wakeword in the middle of a command (eg. 'Play some music, Alexa, the Beatles please'). While such phrasings may be natural for a user, current speech processing systems are not configured to handle commands that are not preceded by a wakeword."

“用户反而可能会先说指令，再说唤醒词（如‘播放音乐，Alexa’），或者甚至在指令之间说唤醒词（如‘播放音乐，Alexa，请播放甲壳虫乐队的歌’）。虽然对用户来说这样很自然，但目前的语音处理系统并没有这样的功能，能识别未说唤醒词就给出的指令。”