The $10 Echo • Hacker News Board

Re: The $10 Echo

#51

Post by dguaraglia » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

Bjartr wrote: post #24

dperfect wrote: post #18

One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home a…

In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.

As anecdata goes, I have an Echo. It was an impulse buy when it came on pre-sale, then didn't know what to do when I actually received. I've been using it for quite a while now and the voice recognition is amazing, but the software is not really there yet. I can tell it to set up a timer from the kitchen (which is around a corner from the device) without much of an issue, even with my, somewhat strong, Argentine accent.

Many of the commands it "fails" at is when it tries to "guess" what I might have meant to say because it can't find something in its database. For example, if I give it a wrong name for a song (say "Alexa play She's Leaving by The Beatles" it might play some song called "She's Leaving" by some other band because it can't find that song under The Beatles.

Re: The $10 Echo

#52

Post by johnhattan » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

dperfect wrote: post #18

One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home a…

Yeah, Echo is a good listener. In fact, when I ran the video on the OP's site and he said "Alexa, what time is it?" my Echo in the other room woke up and told me the time :)

Re: The $10 Echo

#53

Post by sammachin » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:04 PM UTC

kovacs wrote: post #47

This is a pretty cool experiment. As someone that recently worked on an app that was doing speech to text in near and far field, calling this a $10 echo is like calling a Honda Civic a $15K Ferrari. I'd love to see the video of the author speaking to this microphone from 10' away, or even 5' away in a room with no padding. The Echo's ability to do voice to text is like nothing that's ever come before it based on my e…

I totally agree, hence my comments about artistic license in the title! One of the issues right now is that people kinda assume that Echo and Alexa are the same thing hopefully as more 3rd party devices come to market using Alexa the difference will emerge. I'm thinking of doing a follow on post explaining the differences. Also there's not really a generic name for the type of appliance that the Echo is like smartphone, tablet, browser etc. I wonder if echo will become like hoover in years to come?

Re: The $10 Echo

#54

Post by chockablock » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:04 PM UTC

notlisted wrote: post #14

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

Silly. The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively. Detection of the wake word is hardware-based. Nothing is recorded and sent until the wake word is uttered and after that only the part until you finish your question. If you are truly worried about spy devices, you should really consider dropping your cell phone in the toilet. (Yes, I love my echo)

>Nothing is recorded and sent...

How does an outside observer know what is being recorded and stored (e.g. for later analysis or retrieval)? What guarantees does Amazon offer in their terms of service about their use of any recordings? Can the police get a warrant to have Amazon bug my home using my Echo?

Re: The $10 Echo

#55

Post by shas3 » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

dperfect wrote: post #18

One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home a…

> I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies,

You've probably not used the Kinect controller? It has a very sophisticated distant speech system.

Re: The $10 Echo

#56

Post by bjt » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

jimrandomh wrote: post #33

I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in their homes. Cell phone spying is bad enough. If these become widespread, then ten years from now instead of a political debate about call metadata it'll be a debate about literally every word ever spoken .

That's a worry that I share. The good thing about hacks like the OP's is that they push us further in the direction of this technology being open and controlled by the user. We need more of that.

Re: The $10 Echo

#57

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

shas3 wrote: post #55

dperfect wrote: post #18

One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home a…

> I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, You've probably not used the Kinect controller? It has a very sophisticated distant speech system.

I believe the Kinect has a 4-element microphone array. Not quite as good as the Echo's 7-element array but it uses the same idea.

Re: The $10 Echo

#58

Post by njharman » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

jimrandomh wrote: post #33

I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in their homes. Cell phone spying is bad enough. If these become widespread, then ten years from now instead of a political debate about call metadata it'll be a debate about literally every word ever spoken .

> I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in their homes.

That's the problem with progress and technology. It will happen regardless of how comfortable you are with it. In fact, if it helps those with power to maintain or extend their power it will happen. If it tends to limit their power it will be squashed and marginalized.

Re: The $10 Echo

#59

Post by kordless » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

chinathrow wrote: post #30

That's great from the price perspective - I still would not want another active listening device tied to a mega corp within my vicinity. However, I would love to have an Echo like device which does the voice recognition/algo crunching/etc on premise, i.e. on a server/device I control. Is there anything out which does this nicely?

> I still would not want another active listening device tied to a mega corp within my vicinity.

I wish more people were like you and voiced their concerns about this ongoing problem around centralization of services. However...see http://www.cultofmac.com/264381/hardware-siri-runs-puts-new-...:

> Over on Reddit, a post suggests that there are 3 main ‘instances’ (or server farms) for Siri in the United States, and at least one for every other country.

> This information allegedly comes — albeit second-hand — from Apple’s lead cloud architect, who says that every instance of Siri runs on 32 powerful HP servers with a total of 1024 cores and 32 terrabytes of RAM apiece. That certainly makes the new Mac Pro look long in the tooth.

> Specifically, each instance of Siri is made up of 4 HP c7k enclosures made up of 8 HP server blades each, with memory upgrades to 1TB of RAM.

> According to the post, if one server dies, it’s simply removed and another one slapped in, with no downtime.

Granted, there are a lot of people yacking at Siri at a given time, but still. You probably need a fair amount of horsepower to pull this off.

Re: The $10 Echo

#60

Post by sammachin » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #49

The $10 CHIP will be a $10 CHIP when and if it ships. Right now, it's a Kickstarter claiming they will ship the thing in June 2016.

Actually the kickstarter did ship hence why I had my hands on one (well two actually) to do this hack. I backed the kickstarter back in May 2015.

The June2016 date is for orders placed on their store today which I think is the earliest they currently expect to have filled all the current pre-orders and later stage kickstarter backers. IIRC they're currently producing 5000 units a month.