Police Want To Use Amazon Echo To Solve Crimes

UK police is exploring ways to allow victims and witnesses to report crimes via Amazon’s Echo smart speaker from within their own homes.
 
The Lancashire police force is weighing options to use the Echo speakers as a source for information on crimes.The police are examining ways to use the Echo for sending crime bulletins.
 
Amazon’s smart voice assistant Alexa could be used by the police force to broadcast information on the number of officers on duty, missing people, wanted suspects, and offenses within an area, Tech Spot reported.
 
The force is also looking to deploy Alexa for internal purposes such as updating officers about breaking incidents or announcing the daily crime log.
 
However, concerns have been raised over privacy issues in the use of the Echo for crime reporting, as conversation gets recorded and stored on Amazon servers.
 
In December 2016, Arkansas police issued Amazon a search warrant for voice recordings on the Echo device, which belonged to a suspected murderer.
 
The police may also face same issue if they use it for internal briefings.
 
Speaking at the College of Policing conference, the force’s innovation lead, Rob Flanagan said: “If we can reduce demand into our call centers via the use of voice recognition or voice-enabled technology and actually give the community the information they need without them needing to ring into police then that’s massive.”
 
“We think there is quite a lot of information people may prefer to get by asking Alexa,” said Chief Constable Andy Rhodes. “For our staff, it’s great for internal messaging, say there has been a serious incident like the attack on the Manchester Evening News Arena.”

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