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GeekWire – Jeff Bezos Sees A Big Future for Amazon Alexa in Health Care

GeekWire – Last week we wrote about how IBM is already working to improve healthcare with it’s supercomputer Watson. Jeff Bezos feels that his Amazon Alexa can play a role too. At the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, he spoke about Alexa as a potential to healthcare providers. “I think health care is going to be one of those industries that is elevated and made better by machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he said. “And I actually think Echo and Alexa do have a role to play in that.” But he made sure to clarify that he only sees Alexa, the Echo and other AI products as a tool to be used in the medical care system – not a solution. “The medical care system is so big, no one company can do this. It has to be that you provide tools, and then hospitals and doctors and nurses and so on use those tools to improve health care.”

He also addressed the issue of privacy when it comes to Amazon’s Echo devices. As in, could they be eavesdropping on our conversations even when not prompted? No was his answer. He explained that Amazon knows privacy is a primary concern for both companies and consumers, which is why the Amazon Echo has a hard-wired mute button. Physical tampering would be required to allow for eavesdropping, not just a computer virus, which is possible even with most mobile devices today. LINK