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The $10 Echo

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Re: The $10 Echo

#81

Post by Daneel_ »

freyr wrote: post #41
cs2818 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exact opposite for me, does a great job at recognizing speech but a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions.

> a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions. If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface, rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're going to have a better time.

THIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or "play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying "alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"

Re: The $10 Echo

#82

Post by verbify »

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.

Everyone has an accent. Do you mean that you speak General American (i.e. the North East non-coastal accent)?

Re: The $10 Echo

#83

Post by icebraining »

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…

Apple has also said that Siri gets 1 billion requests per week, so by those numbers each core can handle ~10k requests/week, using its share of 32GB of RAM. Doesn't seem that much.

Re: The $10 Echo

#84

Post by baddox »

verbify wrote: post #82
Bjartr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone has an accent. Do you mean that you speak General American (i.e. the North East non-coastal accent)?

Of course you're technically correct, but I find it quite common for Americans to understand that "no accent" refers to General American, even if they're not aware of the term "General American."

Re: The $10 Echo

#85

Post by ntumlin »

detaro wrote: post #78
mintplant wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

There was a demo a while back where some researches created radio interference in headset cables to trigger Siri remotely. It would also be interesting if you could create sounds that sound like commands to the algorithms, but are not easily recognizable for the user.

Something similar to your idea was done for images recognized by neural nets and posted to HN recently. https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-netw...

Re: The $10 Echo

#86

Post by jim_h »

polymathist wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention smartphones seem to be explicitly designed to not provide this use case. Where is my always listening Google Now? If I have to take my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, I may as well type the question myself.

The Moto X and its successors have had this feature for a while. Your phone can be sitting on the other side of the room, completely off, and you can say a certain catch phrase to activate Google Now.

I can usually activate Google Now from a few feet away on my Moto X (2013) but it can't understand what I'm asking after that. I have to get much closer for it to work.

Re: The $10 Echo

#87

Post by Twirrim »

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!"

That could be a fun programming exercise for one of these devices you can hook into Alexa, see if you can catch unauthorised voices quickly and effectively without badly impacting response times.

e.g. you could do it by buffering the request, checking and submitting once you're confident about authenticity, but then you'd be delaying submission and response, depending on how much you'd need to buffer to gain sufficient confidence that the individual is authorised.

Re: The $10 Echo

#88

Post by alister »

Any recommendations for microphones that are (a) high-quality, (b) cheap (under US$5.00), (c) small (under a cubic centimeter), and (d) with analog output (such as a 1/8-inch plug)?

Note that high-quality and cheap are not contradictory requirements. iPhones and other smartphones have extremely high-quality microphones (and they are tiny) and must certainly cost much less than $5 as a part, but they seem impossible to find. Every off-the-shelf mic under $5 that I've tried has been garbage in terms of sound quality, and even much more expensive ones have not been great.

Good mics certainly exist. Here's a compact analog microphone I own that has fantastic sound quality:

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Electret-Condenser-Microphone-ECM...

But it's ridiculous that this microphone costs 6x as much as the CHIP and 10x as the RPi Zero. You can't build a product around the CHIP or the RPi if an essential part is that expensive.

Re: The $10 Echo

#89

Post by bitJericho »

alister wrote: post #88

Any recommendations for microphones that are (a) high-quality, (b) cheap (under US$5.00), (c) small (under a cubic centimeter), and (d) with analog output (such as a 1/8-inch plug)? Note that high-quality and cheap are not contradictory requirements. iPhones and other smartphones have extremely high-quality microphones (and they are tiny ) and must certainly cost much less than $5 as a part, but they seem impossible…

This is my favorite cheap microphone. It does need to be fairly close, I'd say within 5 feet:

http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Acoustics-100Hz-Microphone-ACM-1...

Re: The $10 Echo

#90

Post by dopeboy »

njharman wrote: post #58
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.

False. Technology can proceed with privacy in mind. The Echo didn't have to push things to the cloud. It was, however, constructed to do so both for Amazon's benefit (data) and the consumer's benefit (ease of setup and use).

The trend you cite will happen because of ignorance, not progress.

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