Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

> There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image.

What's the point you're trying to get at here. I think it's well understood that there can be false positives -- but can you tell me at what rate of false positives it makes this type of child abuse detection unjustified? Also can you tell me what rate Apples system would cause a false positive. If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. I understand it's unpleasant for that one person, but I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop.

> It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example.

This is in my opinion where thinking of people on your side is wrong and fundamentally dealing with these hard and nuanced issues on the wrong conceptual level. If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet.

The thing that you're fundamentally missing the point on, in my opinion, is that the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest. The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.

It's pretty easy to do: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/21/how-to-use-google-assistant-...

Can you use an Alexa and gut it while replacing the controller? I don’t know how it mixes the mics but you can have your case and array, hopefully the hardware isn’t dependent on the processor.

What about a controller you carry around with you that you can speak into, like phone software, a watch, or if you’re into the hacker chic look, a mounted mic you wear?

I don’t think speaking is even the best choice, it’s limiting, a phone can be a web interface, gestures over a sensor seems reasonable for basic controls and speech to text can be piped into it as commands though your phone you carry with you anyway.

If you’re controlling lights it’s less hassle though a GUI, and limiting it to voice will not make your life easier.

Boy, there's a number of misconceptions here. I was considering not responding, but you're so wrong here that I just can't walk away and let you continue to spread this kind of blatantly wrong handwaving.

> If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make.

How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that

a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images

b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image

You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion.

> I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop.

That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water.

> If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that.

Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again.

> If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet.

Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates.

> the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest

If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse.

> The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts.

What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you.

> Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.

Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way.

[0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

Wow, this is exactly what I'm looking for, thanks so much for developing it. I'm going to give it a shot over the holidays, have a pretty big home assistant install I'd love to control via voice.

I'd primarily like to be able to turn on/off a few specific switches, set a few specific scenes and ideally play a few playlists (squeezebox integrated with home assistant). Would creating scripts in HA and then calling them from Hi be the way to go for customising without building custom components?

If this works well I'll be keen to add a few cheap pis plus ps3 eye cameras around the house.