NEW YORK: May be it sounds surprising, but it’s true. United State police investigating a murder have tussled with Amazon over access to data gathered by one of its Echo speakers after the voice-controlled device was found near to a hot tub, where the victim was found dead amid signs of a struggle.

Officers investigating a murder in Arkansas obtain data from an Echo speaker despite Amazon's refusal to help.

According to court filings, Amazon was issued with two search warrants, but refused to share information sent by the smart device to its servers. However, the police said a detective found a way to extract data from the device itself.

The accused killer has yet to be put on trial and it is not clear whether the information ultimately proved useful to the investigation.

The court records say one of deceased's eyes and lips appeared to be swollen and suspected blood spots were found around the rim of the hot tub.

Detectives say they learned that music had been streamed to the back patio at the time of death, which they thought might have been controlled via the Echo's smart assistant Alexa.

The "always on" machine makes recordings of audio it hears from a fraction of a second before it detects a wake word - either Alexa or Amazon - until it judges the command to be over. This audio is then transmitted to Amazon's computer servers, which interpret the request and tell it how to respond.

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