“Hey Alexa, are you HIPAA compliant?”

In a not so distant past, people would look at me with expressions of concern as I attempted to verbally coerce my computer into not crashing as I submitted by term paper minutes before the deadline. While talking to inanimate objects used to be a sign for concern (unless you’re David Hasselhoff accompanied by KITT from Knight Rider), nowadays it is an everyday occurrence for much of the population.
A significant majority of our personal electronics are embedded with virtual assistant software: Google’s Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa among them. With these virtual assistants safely residing in our devices, we can speak to our phones, watches, computers, and now even our speakers. The final contender of that list has exploded in popularity over the last year. Smart speakers were the hottest items for the holiday season, especially thanks to Black Friday sales that lingered through the end of the holidays. With Apple missing out on the holiday sales earlier this year due to the delay of its HomePod smart speaker, Google and Amazon dominated the smart speaker sales boasting sales in the millions of their respective devices, according to industry estimates.
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