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Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

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Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#131

Post by philwelch »

dorgo wrote: post #129
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time. People said again and again it's going to be abused, and you had the technical knowledge to evaluate the risk. Yet you went with it. If it was not your scenario, it would have been another one. There will be other ones. Hell, with things like PRISM, that's inviting 3 letters agencies in your bed…

>Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time. How is it different from a smartphone or notebook?

You can put them in the freezer like Edward Snowden.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#132

Post by lcvw »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #85
lcvw wrote: post #17

I’m also very interested in an answer. We use Alexa a lot, but this week I had to unplug every Alexa in the house because a distant family member had gained access to the family Amazon account and was trying to use the “drop in” feature to listen to our conversations. In the course of our investigation I found out that Alexa does not log privacy related events at all (there is no record of a drop in stored anywhere),…

Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time. People said again and again it's going to be abused, and you had the technical knowledge to evaluate the risk. Yet you went with it. If it was not your scenario, it would have been another one. There will be other ones. Hell, with things like PRISM, that's inviting 3 letters agencies in your bed…

The Alexas were for my elderly mother in law. If she fell or was having some sort of problem, she could call us with just her voice.

Also she and my partner both like the convenience, so who am I to say that they shouldn’t have such a device? The device does have hardware switches for the camera (it was off) and the microphone but you can’t switch off the microphone without effectively disabling the device.

When I she bought these devices they didn’t have this feature. None of us knew that the feature was deployed and enabled by default. To your point, it is a huge issue that we have no control over these devices anymore since the software can be changed at any time and can lie to you (lies of omission usually).

The Alexa goes above and beyond imo because when this person gained access to my mother in law’s other accounts, it took about 30 minutes to permanently lock him out, despite him bypassing text based tfa by having compromised her phone. Alexa wouldn’t even tell me this problem existed, and I can’t document what happened unlike with literally every other service.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#133

Post by marginalia_nu »

fartcannon wrote: post #15
bonniemuffin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. I have Siri, Alexa, and Google home devices in my house, and Siri is the best in terms of competence and privacy. Alexa feels like being bugged by a creepo who keeps trying to sell me stuff. (We got rid of the Alexa.)

They all spy. Alexa is just the most obvious. You should get rid of them all.

I find it pretty funny how the business model is pretty much exactly that of BonziBuddy.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#134

Post by michaelnik »

jffry wrote: post #6

I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos

I use MyCroft/PiCroft (Pi4) + PS2 mic array (15$), it is cheap and relatively easy to hack in Python/Git. I believe it uses Mozilla's voice service. Has no ads.

Commands which work nicely which we use all the time: "Hi Mycroft, set timer to X minutes." "play news", "set alarm to 6 am", "what's the temperature?", "will it rain?", "what's the time in Paris?".

I wrote METAR and TAF module for it to get more detailed weather (and learn some Python).

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#135

Post by thrashh »

raffraffraff wrote: post #58
lcvw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was truly a bizarre experience. First we noticed a random intermittent ringing noise in the house and couldn’t figure out what it was. We tracked it down to the Alexa but since there are no logs or notifications we didn’t know what had just happened. It seems the person hung up when they heard us looking around so we never saw any visible indication that anything was happening. Once we figured it out, we then had…

Honestly, I find it amazing that so many people let these things into their homes. The price you pay for such little actual utility isn't worth it. I won't use voice recognition on a single device. Not only do I not trust Google/Amazon, I don't trust that I wouldn't accidentally say something that triggers it to phone a person I'm talking about, or order something expensive in the internet. Home Assistant on my phone…

I’m not worried about my Google Home devices

They’d have to work reliably first

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#136

Post by BiteCode_dev »

dorgo wrote: post #129
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time. People said again and again it's going to be abused, and you had the technical knowledge to evaluate the risk. Yet you went with it. If it was not your scenario, it would have been another one. There will be other ones. Hell, with things like PRISM, that's inviting 3 letters agencies in your bed…

>Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time. How is it different from a smartphone or notebook?

Intent.

I don't have my phone expecting it to listen to all the room, all the time.

It could, but if it is, it's not a deliberate choice.

The microphone is not made of this, I regularly put it in plane mode, I don't have an account linked to the phone nor smart assistant actives.

Listening to my phone all the time would require targetting, since it's not, unlike alexa, doing so by design: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/conferences/2020/02/25/go...

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#137

Post by michaelnik »

qchris wrote: post #107
jffry wrote: post #6

I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos

I played around with their open source code a few years ago, and found it, well, operable, if not particularly useful. On the flip side, I do not, I repeat, DO NOT recommend giving their team money for pretty much any reason. They've been struggling to put together any working hardware (and promising the opposite) for years through a genuine comedy of errors. I think the most recent design iteration of MycroftV2 is s…

It is a small team, maybe few people? On the other hand, Amazon has 10k people on Alexa[1]. One wonders how much is worth info they are sucking out of households....

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#138

Post by sneak »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #88
sneak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people believe that they have nothing to hide. To them, there is no cost in lost privacy because they do not value privacy. The sad part is, for most people who say this, it's true. Their lives indeed contain nothing interesting enough to be worth concealing.

When I'm feeling spicy, my response to that line of thinking is to ask that person for their house keys so I can come by sometime and look around. Or I'll ask them to unlock their phone so I can rummage around in their messages and photos.

I know a fair number of people who would not object.

The majority of people on Earth have pretty boring lives.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#139

Post by qchris »

michaelnik wrote: post #137
qchris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played around with their open source code a few years ago, and found it, well, operable, if not particularly useful. On the flip side, I do not, I repeat, DO NOT recommend giving their team money for pretty much any reason. They've been struggling to put together any working hardware (and promising the opposite) for years through a genuine comedy of errors. I think the most recent design iteration of MycroftV2 is s…

It is a small team, maybe few people? On the other hand, Amazon has 10k people on Alexa[1]. One wonders how much is worth info they are sucking out of households.... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...

That could be it, I suppose. Sorry, I'm not trying to make this a personal attack on the team (I don't know any of them), and I'm not personally invested in their success or failure (I haven't purchased any of their stuff or invested in them). I just think that it would be cool to have an easy-to-use, hackable home assistant that does most of its computation locally, and that's what they're (supposed to be) building.

In a lot of ways, it doesn't really matter why they're not producing results, so much as the fact that they're not producing them. I mean, check out the list of remaining action items in their last "Production Update"[1]. This came over 8 months since shipping what were supposed to be the Mark II devkits, and almost four years(!) after they announced work on the Mark II in early 2018 [2], which has since gone through about a zillion different design changes. I won't claim to be an expert, but having had even a bit of experience with product development of this kind, this is not the happy path to getting consumer electronics shipped.

[1] https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-up...

[2] https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see...

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#140

Post by genocidicbunny »

sneak wrote: post #138
genocidicbunny wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm feeling spicy, my response to that line of thinking is to ask that person for their house keys so I can come by sometime and look around. Or I'll ask them to unlock their phone so I can rummage around in their messages and photos.

I know a fair number of people who would not object. The majority of people on Earth have pretty boring lives.

Then I hold out my hand expectedly awaiting their house keys and phone.
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