For many, Alexa is seen as another member of the family.
Instead of turning to our nearest and dearest for info on the weather, cooking recipes and music choices, we look to Amazon’s voice-activated assistant for help.
But gadget fans who are already worried their smart speakers might be eavesdropping on their conversations have been warned by an expert to keep Alexa in downstairs rooms only.
Dr Hannah Fry has said the digital assistant should be treated the same as other guests in your home and kept out of private areas such as the bedroom and bathroom.
With an estimated two million households in the UK thought to own an Alexa, Dr Fry, a mathematician and expert on tech company algorithms, says there is a ‘creep’ of allowing gadgets to invade our privacy, as reported by the Daily Mail .
The associate professor at University College London said: "I think there are some spaces in your home, like the bedroom and bathroom, which should remain completely private.
"This technology is activated by a trigger word but it keeps recording for a short period afterwards.
"People accept that, but we should all spend more time thinking about what it means for us."
After Dr Hannah Fry, who is giving the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures, asked tech firms to provide the data they had collected on her, she said she found recordings of conversations taken from within her home.
She added that 'very senior' people in the tech industry won't even take a smartphone into their bedroom and buyers should be very wary of low price technology with microphones linked to the internet.
Earlier this year, Amazon admitted staff listen to customers’ conversations through Alexa , stating the recordings were used to help improve the Echo device’s understanding of human speech.
A report by news site Bloomberg suggested many users are unaware humans are listening in, with staff each able to review up to 1,000 audio clips a day.
Teams had also shared recordings they found funny in internal chat rooms.
