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The $10 Echo

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Re: The $10 Echo

#61

Post by mintplant »

johnhattan wrote: post #52
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 :)

That's actually one of my concerns about voice-driven interfaces, absent some sort of voice print authentication or tactile confirmation button. Imagine standing up in a crowded room and shouting "OK Google, delete everything!", or "OK Google, recite the first thouand digits of pi!"

Re: The $10 Echo

#62

Post by bpicolo »

scholia wrote: post #39
cek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Alexa Fund page lists a sub-set of the companies that have received funding from the fund so far: https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa...

So how does Amazon make money from Alexa running on non-Amazon devices? (Not obvious to me, sorry.)

It's going to evolve into a massive app ecosystem, surely with paid apps

Re: The $10 Echo

#63

Post by cthalupa »

a3_nm wrote: post #36
notlisted wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively. Detection of the wake word is hardware-based For now, maybe. If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out? I'd say it's not entirely silly to be worried about something in your home which is controlled by a third party and could turn into a spying device at any moment, even though it seems not to have become evil yet.

>If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out

The echo traffic always flows through your internet - it has no 3G/4G hardware, for example. If you want to do a pcap with tcpdump or similar, you can.

When I first received mine, I set up a packet capture on my linux firewall/ips/nat device and looked at traffic outbound to the internet from the echo. If I was particularly paranoid, I could leave this running 24/7 outputting to a pcap, and then watch that file for changes and get notifications whenever it did.

Honestly, if you're worried about this sort of thing, you shouldn't own a cell phone.

Re: The $10 Echo

#64

Post by cthalupa »

kordless wrote: post #59
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 a…

They talked a bit more about the Siri setup at a talk they gave for the Mesos guys (Siri runs on Mesos with a custom schedule Apple wrote - one of the biggest Mesos installs out there)

https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/04/23/apple-details-j-a-r-v...

They say the clusters have 1k worker nodes

Re: The $10 Echo

#65

Post by petercooper »

mintplant wrote: post #61
johnhattan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

That's actually one of my concerns about voice-driven interfaces, absent some sort of voice print authentication or tactile confirmation button. Imagine standing up in a crowded room and shouting "OK Google, delete everything!", or "OK Google, recite the first thouand digits of pi!"

We used to do this at work. "Hey Siri! Call [person's partner]". Everyone turned their voice activated stuff off quite quickly after that.

Re: The $10 Echo

#66

Post by shas3 »

IshKebab wrote: post #57
shas3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't know about the specifics of characterizing beam-pattern, etc. I am pretty sure, Kinect 1.0 can be more directional in spite of having fewer microphones because the microphones are cardioid, as opposed to the uni/omni-directional ones used in the Echo. Also, some parts of the design of the Kinect speech processing pipeline is public. You can read about in Ivan Tashev's (of MSR) book [1], IEEE Signal Processing Magazine article [2], and some presentation videos he has online [3]. Also, see his publication list, a lot of papers are relevant to the Kinect speech pipeline http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publicat...

Also obligatory, why the downvotes?

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1022... [2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2012... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=tashev+video+lectures&oq=tas...

Re: The $10 Echo

#68

Post by goldenkey »

cthalupa wrote: post #63
a3_nm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively. Detection of the wake word is hardware-based For now, maybe. If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out? I'd say it's not entirely silly to be worried about something in your home which is controlled by a third party and could turn into a spying device at any moment, even though it seems not to have become evil yet.

>If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out The echo traffic always flows through your internet - it has no 3G/4G hardware, for example. If you want to do a pcap with tcpdump or similar, you can. When I first received mine, I set up a packet capture on my linux firewall/ips/nat device and looked at traffic outbound to the internet from the echo. If I was particularly paranoid, I could leave this r…

"Honestly if you are worried about this sort of X, you shouldn't live in a [subset of first-world country utilities.]"

Ad hominem. C'mon, I expect better specious arguments on Hacker News.

Re: The $10 Echo

#69

Post by cthalupa »

goldenkey wrote: post #68
cthalupa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out The echo traffic always flows through your internet - it has no 3G/4G hardware, for example. If you want to do a pcap with tcpdump or similar, you can. When I first received mine, I set up a packet capture on my linux firewall/ips/nat device and looked at traffic outbound to the internet from the echo. If I was particularly paranoid, I could leave this r…

"Honestly if you are worried about this sort of X, you shouldn't live in a [subset of first-world country utilities.]" Ad hominem. C'mon, I expect better specious arguments on Hacker News.

That's not even remotely an ad hominem, though I imagine you just mean it's a fallacious argument in general.

That being said, hardly. We already know that law enforcement can use cell phones to spy on people. There is an abstract fear that the Echo might do this in the future (enough analysis has been done to know that it does not currently), yet we know for sure that cell phones can do it currently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellphone_surveillance

http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdro...

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/08/02/fbi-can-remotely-acti...

Re: The $10 Echo

#70

Post by goldenkey »

cthalupa wrote: post #69
goldenkey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Honestly if you are worried about this sort of X, you shouldn't live in a [subset of first-world country utilities.]" Ad hominem. C'mon, I expect better specious arguments on Hacker News.

That's not even remotely an ad hominem, though I imagine you just mean it's a fallacious argument in general. That being said, hardly. We already know that law enforcement can use cell phones to spy on people. There is an abstract fear that the Echo might do this in the future (enough analysis has been done to know that it does not currently), yet we know for sure that cell phones can do it currently. https://en.wiki…

It is ad hominem because you implicate anyone who worries about one device to stop worrying because you can choose from a bouquet, some other flower they should be more worried about.

Gun safety says it's unwise to point a gun, even an unloaded or uncocked gun, at someone you don't wish to shoot. In the same vein, it's unsettling to have microphones and cameras around one's house _even_ if you suppose they are off. Because the latent ability is potential oppression.

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