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Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

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Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#31

Post by gnicholas »

If you can get comfortable with Siri (which does send audio to the cloud, though with iOS 15 there's more on-device capability), you should experiment with controlling Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa via Siri.

I set up my phone so I can say "hey Siri ok google" and then it asks me what I want to tell google. I then say any command supported by the Google Assistant, and it passes the command through.

Technically I think it's supposed to work all in one utterance, but I have found that it never works that way. I always have to split it up. Even still, this is a pretty handy way to be able to ask for information (Siri's knowledge seems quite limited compared to Alexa/Google) without having any always-listening devices in my home.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#33

Post by lcvw »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #27
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),…

That deserves its own post. This reminds me of when Samsung sent the press release that people shouldn’t discuss personal things near their television, because an unpatchable product of their allowed anyone who knew how to tap into the tv mics…

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 to spend half a day going through the Alexa documentation (useless) and random threads on Reddit to figure out how the access control for this feature and Alexa in general works. Like I said, certain changes to your account cannot be made without contacting support and being escalated to a certain team. By the end of it I still could not be certain we had locked this person out because of the number of changes they had made to the account and how much of a mess the app is.

The thing I really don’t understand is that this feature has been deployed for over a year and has received negative attention in the press. It’s just unbelievable that they would ship a feature that can turn your Alexa into a listening device and not think through what could go wrong, and never revisit it in a year.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#35

Post by lixtra »

3a2d29 wrote: post #21

I don't want to sound like a smart ass, but I feel like a good alternative to Alexa is just doing all that yourself. I have never had an Alexa but surely there isn't that much time saved by having it turn off lights. Siri on your iPhone can set alarms and shopping lists and presumably your phone it always around you.

> I have never had an Alexa but surely there isn't that much time saved by having it turn off lights

You should try.

It’s a trade off: You choose when to spend more time to set up the assistant, in order to save time setting an alarm while you have your hands in the dough.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#36

Post by nullc »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

Maybe this is an obvious answer, and therefore not one you're interested in, but there's Siri. Although audio is sent to the cloud, you can choose whether it is stored or not, and whatever you pick, Apple's privacy policy is very strict. HomePods are mostly advertised as music playback devices, but I mostly use mine as a HomeKit control device. Homebridge allows you to control non-HomeKit devices via Siri: https://ho…

> you can choose whether it is stored or not

You choose to tell them to store it or not. Due to third party doctrine you have very little legal protection for material you voluntarily provide to a third party. Even if apple behaves honestly and has no vulnerabilities or compromises they may be forced to hand the data over.

And the fact that you don't know this says to me that Apple is in practice unethically exaggerating the level of privacy they're able to provide.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#38

Post by novok »

ummonk wrote: post #18
colordrops wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible suggestion. "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. Companies have shown time and again that they lie about what is happening behind the scenes, or even just change their policies for the worst. Then there are rogue employees, such as the Ubiquiti fiasco, and secret government data collection, such as PRISM, of which Apple was a participant. Apple has broken trust multiple time…

Unless you design your own hardware and build your own fab to manufacture it, you're always taking the word of at least one company.

Yeah the same logic applies to any network connected device you buy that has microphones on them.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#39

Post by betwixthewires »

Polished? No

There are open source speech to text engines, text to speech engines and assistant software with APIs, you could probably build something with a raspberry pi, I looked into it a while back but I don't really mind light switches.

"Open Assistant" should get the ball rolling for you, search that and dive down the rabbit hole of open source home automation.

Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

#40

Post by russnes »

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

Technically you should be able to run your own back-end, but I ended up giving up on this endeavor when I tried a few months ago. It should be doable if you give it a few good days, but it wasn't very well documented at least when I tried, and there's a lot of different parts you have to get working.

After you get it to work, I'm not sure if your server would have a worse data set for speech recognition etc, maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing it should be all right because they are using a Mozilla free data set (which you contribute to by default I think, if you use their server).

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