You may think of your virtual assistant as a kind of trusty companion, giving out weather forecasts, recipes, news and all sorts of ephemera on request.
But these devices also pose a host of security risks that render users vulnerable to hacks, eavesdropping, data siphoning and other threats that might not be immediately apparent. That danger was highlighted Thursday when Amazon.com Inc. said one of its Echo home speakers mistakenly recorded a private conversation and sent it to someone in the owners’ contact list. Amazon,...