Amazon is turning off the ability to process voice requests locally. It's a seemingly major privacy pivot and one that some Alexa users might not appreciate. However, this change affects exactly three Echo devices and only if you actively enabled Do Not Send Voice Recordings in the Alexa app settings.
Right. It's potentially not that big of a deal and, to be fair, the level of artificial intelligence Alexa+ is promising, let alone the models it'll be using, all but precludes local processing. It's pretty much what Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Echo, told us when he explained that these queries would be encrypted, sent to the cloud, and then processed by Amazon's and partner Antrhopic's AI models at servers far, far away.
