The popularity of smart speakers in the home continues to rise, with many becoming an integral part of people’s day to day lives and habits. From asking their speaker “what the weather will be like at the weekend” to switching off the lights with their voice, it’s easy to see why they’ve become much more than a way to listen to their favourite songs.
However, alongside their everyday usefulness, smart speakers are not exempt from criticism and to a certain extent, skepticism around how secure they are. We surveyed almost 1000 smart speaker owners around the UK to see what their thoughts are on voice-activated technology. 19% of those surveyed said they “get annoyed when their smart speaker doesn’t listen to them” and 13% of respondents said they were worried their smart speaker “was listening in on them”.
Given that survey respondents feared they are being listened to by their device, you would expect consumers to ensure that whatever they say at home remains between themselves. However, the survey also revealed that just 14% of Smart Speaker owners have read the terms of service.
We’re all guilty of bypassing our new tech’s documents, especially when all we want to do is get it plugged in, but could the length and complexity of some smart speakers’ terms be putting consumers off?
We researched and analysed the UK’s most popular smart speakers’ terms of service to see how easy they are to read. Using metrics such as the number of documents, the time it takes to read them and the “Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease” score (where 0 is very hard and 100 is very easy) we found that Siri’s terms of service are the easiest to read and understand. The smart speaker with the most difficult terms of service to understand is Amazon’s Alexa, which took over 180 minutes to read with a total of 17 documents.
However, alongside their everyday usefulness, smart speakers are not exempt from criticism and to a certain extent, skepticism around how secure they are. We surveyed almost 1000 smart speaker owners around the UK to see what their thoughts are on voice-activated technology. 19% of those surveyed said they “get annoyed when their smart speaker doesn’t listen to them” and 13% of respondents said they were worried their smart speaker “was listening in on them”.
Given that survey respondents feared they are being listened to by their device, you would expect consumers to ensure that whatever they say at home remains between themselves. However, the survey also revealed that just 14% of Smart Speaker owners have read the terms of service.
We’re all guilty of bypassing our new tech’s documents, especially when all we want to do is get it plugged in, but could the length and complexity of some smart speakers’ terms be putting consumers off?
We researched and analysed the UK’s most popular smart speakers’ terms of service to see how easy they are to read. Using metrics such as the number of documents, the time it takes to read them and the “Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease” score (where 0 is very hard and 100 is very easy) we found that Siri’s terms of service are the easiest to read and understand. The smart speaker with the most difficult terms of service to understand is Amazon’s Alexa, which took over 180 minutes to read with a total of 17 documents.
