Won’t be no horde of microphones and cameras all connected up to a corporate database and kept in storage forever in my house!
Could the OPs SO have turned it on since the house was empty for some time? And then didn’t turn it off just because? It would have been the sound to go with the cameras. Probably for some type of security in the - u know - the empty house? CC knew about the cameras as she turned them off but didn’t know about drop in feature, which is probably now turned off. He can still call her over the Alexa, just that she has to tell Alexa to pick up. We haven’t added our phone contacts to Alexa nor set up the various voices recognition features.
Thanks for that- just tried it!
Not a fan of Alexa, but I equipped a client of mine with a pair of Google Home Minis. He has a neurological condition where he can randomly lose the ability to stand - all the muscles in his legs just give out. This has happened twice. He’s not in the habit of carrying his phone everywhere, so twice he’s been stuck on the floor, trying to pull himself over to the phone. With the Google Home, unlike Alexa, Suri, or Cortana, he can make a phone call from anywhere in voice range of one of the Minis.
As long as you have a cell phone, Echo can make phone calls. With the $35 Echo Connect box, you can do the same from your landline.
Alexa is a Sniz! Hate that woman! Or whatever it is.
No. He can’t.
He has to use the “drop in” feature to hear you. Also, there is a warning tone that sounds when the drop in feature is activated before someone starts listening in. If you don’t hear the warning tone, you can turn up the volume on that. He didn’t start listening to you completely out of nowhere.
But if you’re going to be uninformed and paranoid about it, you can disable the drop in feature on your Echoes.
You can make phone calls with Alexa, too. You just need to set it up and allow access to your phone.
You broke off mid-sentence 
You say “good morning” to your machine? Why? It’s a machine! Don’t anthropomorphize it.
I don’t know why people don’t see this. In 1984, Big Brother had to force everyone to have two-way telescreens in their houses. In 2018, people willingly let them in. And don’t care. And post every last bit of their personal lives on-line for all to see.
Why not? I say “good morning” to my dog, and he doesn’t even reply.
They are probably standing on other people’s lawns too!
I like Alexa, listening all the time or not.
Alexa is prettier than Siri, but Siri has bigger boobs.
Yeah, I got nothing, I just wanted to add my own inane comment before the thread goes off the rails. 
No, not everything. Only things that make them seem happy all the time or cause outrage.
Or cute/annoying small furry animals.
That’s like telling some one to not see patterns in random distributions, like pictures in clouds. We’re human, it’s what we do. Actually, a lot of species do it, well, not antropo-morphize, but cano-morphize, or would it be skylo-morphize? Whatever.
I’ve apologized to mine. She accepted it, not very graciously in my opinion, but still.
Oh, and I’ve tested her. I’m pretty sure she’s not spying on me.
Pull the plug and put it in the closet.
By the time he joins you these things will probably have run their course anyway so it will probably never again see the light of day.
I figure these gizmos will have the staying power of 3D TVs. By 2019 you’ll only see them at garage sales. There simply is no long term use case for them. Once the novelty wears off and security issues mount they will tank.
So tell him you are “temporarily” disconnecting it until he can be there to manage it.
Alexa only slightly bothers me.*
It’s MS’s Cortana that people should really be afraid of. MS has a whole 'nother set of “rules” for conduct than Amazon, Google or Apple.
And it comes on MS-Windows 10 machines.
If you want something that’s sort of Alexa but not on all the time, get an Amazon Dash Wand. You have to press the button to activate it. Battery powered, can’t run non-stop.
- I was talking with Mrs FtG this morning and somehow triggered Alexa without saying its name. I repeated what I said and no dice. Do not like that.
I’m wondering if Alexa can be trained to a-hum and a-ha at the right times…
I’m having a problem lately where my radio is talking to my Alexa 
I listen to the baseball games on my radio, which sits 3’ from Alexa. The radio station is now running ads for their iHeartRadio app (being that it’s an iHeartRadio station) that includes the line “Alexa, tune in to WMMS on iHeartRadio.” My Alexa (Echo) dutifully obliges the radio.
I read an article around the time of the last Super Bowl about how Amazon is able to stop all Echos from responding to the “Alexa” in Echo commercials by feeding the specific triggering sound clip from the commercial into the global Echo backend system and making it ignore that sound clip. Unfortunately, Amazon can’t do this for every little radio station that tries to be cute with its marketing.