So far, Alexa ignores me when I ask her to write this newsletter. But smart speakers are already having a huge impact elsewhere. UK-based content marketing agency Delineate found that 24% of U.S. households have a smart speaker and 54% of smart speaker owners have used them for shopping.

Since we’re on the topic of sales automation, let’s finish with news that “conversational marketing platform” Drift has added its own tool to help sales reps. Drift provides a chatbot, event-triggered personalized email sequences, and personalized Web site messages. If you’re keeping score, they’ve raised $47 million.

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.