SAN FRANCISCO – Shower shower? Control. Twin sheets? Control. Echo Dot … control?
Starting this fall, some students at Northeastern University in Boston will be able to get an Echo Dot smart speaker linked to their university accounts. They'll be able to ask Amazon's Alexa what time their classes are, how much money is left on their food card, and even how much they owe to the scholarship office.
The program gives students instant access to information they would otherwise have to call or go online for, and takes the pressure off school offices. It also makes Amazon's digital assistant a good resource for a generation that will inhabit a world where talking to computers is commonplace and will soon have paychecks to spend.
At the same time, it raises questions about safety and privacy for young adults living in close quarters, often on their own for the first time.
The specialized Alexa skill is called Husky Helper, after Northeastern's mascot. The developers began their work by asking for a list of the most common questions students asked when they called the school's student services hotlines.
“Some students were calling to ask things like how much they owed on their university account and had to wait on hold for 40 minutes” because call center representatives had to go through different systems to get the answer, Somen Saha said. co-CEO of n-Powered, the tech startup that created the Alexa skill for school.
They then connected to the various university databases that contained this information and incorporated it into the Husky Helper skill so that students could request answers using their voice rather than a phone or computer.
The skill was piloted with approximately 60 students in the 2017-2018 school year. In the fall, the program will be rolled out to a larger group of students at the school. N-Powered says it is working with many other universities to create similar skills for their students.
The process is by no means one-click. In the pilot program, each student was given an Echo Dot, a smaller version of Amazon's Alexa-enabled smart speakers. They had to sign up for an Amazon account and then check it out. They then had to sign a Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act document to allow access to their student records.
They then logged into the program portal with their student ID number and in return were sent a personalized invitation to their Northeastern email address to validate their account.
They eventually linked this account to their Amazon account. At that point, they were given the option to decide what information they wanted to make available, from course schedules to tuition payment information.
Students started using it for a wide range of questions. Some were pretty clear. For example, one of the top requests was the current meal card balance.
Others at first seemed out of left field.
“Is my health insurance waiver registered?” kept showing up, said Joel Evans, n_Powered's co-CEO. They finally realized that the university requires students to either enroll in the school's health plan or submit a waiver saying they are in another plan. If they haven't, they are locked out of many systems until they do.
One telling sequence the developers noticed was that students would first ask when their next lesson was, then ask Alexa to set an alarm for 15 minutes before that.
Students also had access to the full range of Alexa skills and used them to set reminders, listen to music and request weather reports.
One closure: If there are multiple Echo devices in the earpiece, the closest one always answers. For students who shared a dorm and each had an echo, this was a problem.
But they quickly realized that if they changed the alarm on one of them (the Echo, Amazon, and the computer are all possibilities) they could each get information from their own accounts.
Amazon already has a presence on some campuses, where students can pick up their Amazon delivery purchases from special Amazon lockers. However, extending the Amazon Echo and Alexa platform to these younger customers is newer.
It also raises thorny privacy questions for young adults who live in close proximity and are often living alone for the first time.
Alexa can't distinguish between different people's voices, so a nosy roommate could be a problem, said Paul Bischoff, a privacy advocate with Comparitech.com, a security and privacy review site.
“There's also the problem of third parties just listening to otherwise private information spoken aloud by Alexa,” he said.
Some sensitive information is not accessible at all. For example, if a student requests their grades or a financial hold on their accounts, the skill gives them the contact information for the responsible university staff, Saha said.
Neither Amazon nor the university stores personalized information from the skill about what students request or how they use the skill. Developers can see overall how popular certain topics are, which helps them improve skills as more students use it.
The “born digital” generation is extremely aware of their digital privacy, so students may be able to understand how to adapt to privacy vulnerabilities.
“They may adapt their behavior and routines to the platform they're on. They could use the phone for some questions, Alexa for others,” said Leah Plunkett, a law professor at the University of New Hampshire and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Which isn't to say that someone won't find a way to abuse it, either as a prank or simply at a late-night drunken party.
“I'd be surprised,” Plunkett said, “if you don't see some kind of hilarious privacy-invasion stories about Alexa in college dorms.”
