Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet I'm guessing you carry a smart phone in your pocket almost everywhere you go.
But phones don't have a microphone on them do they? :-)
(should I tell him, guys?)
Amazon Echo Dot
321–330 of 410 posts
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#322When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?
I love "smart" devices, but hate "devices that needlessly insist on connecting to the Internet". One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home n…
As dumb as it sounds, it is probably easier that way. Sometimes in LANs it is easier to get data out then back in. For example, a lot of dorm networks don't support Chromecast devices because chromecasts tries to multicast on the LAN for discovery, but dorms have networking policies that prevent this.
A webcam that sends the data out to the internet then back would avoid the discovery issue by using an external webserver as a rendezvous point.
I don't think people spend a lot of time thinking about their home networking. You could imagine most people just plug in their home routers and it is a crapshoot whether or not the router will support the necessary functionality, whereas a router will always enable communication to the outside world (or people would return it ASAP).
With that said, this seems like a straightforward technical problem that may have technical solutions.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about accidental triggers of the wake word? What about planted "wake words" to record people discussion "inappropriate" things?
For the Echo, at least, it has to use your home network, so you could pretty easily run a packet capture to see if it's ever sending audio out when you don't want it to. Harder for things with cellular data, though.
It's a cat-and-mouse game: What if it only sent the clandestine information when it picks up the "normal" word? The point is you don't control the device or its software.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#324My FireTV is also upgraded to Alexa silently recently and it's fun to play with. Is it possible for me to upload my own content, say an audio book, some music I own etc so I can use Alexa as a voice command to fetch my own data too? be it on the cloud or my local NAS/DLNA box.
You can upload your own music into the amazon music library, and then play it via the echo:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
I assume an audio book could be uploaded as music, but I'm not sure if you can flag it as a book.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#325I love my echo! I probably use it 15-25 times a day. 1) Acts as my alarm 2) Turn on my favorite radio station while I make breakfast. 3) Timers for cooking breakfast. 4) Listen to flash news 5) Alarm again if I need a nap. 6) Timers for lunch meal 7) Add item to shopping list. 8) Add todo items. 9) Plays spotify while I work on my computer from across the room. 10) More flash news (its really quite extensive) 11) mor…
Wow, you need a reality check here with your "A bloated sense of self importance?". Here is some history for you....
My Dad has written a book about Native Americans in the pacific northwest. Part of his research turned up personnel letters from an officer in the US Cavalry long ago (many officers). These letters were very personnel, and only ever meant to be read by his wife. Unfortunately, these letters were passed down in the family many times up until recently a family member got fed up with this box of letters and donated it to the University of Washington where my Dad found the letters relevant to his research, and others of personal nature as I explained.
You can't even begin to imagine what devices (production, backup, test, hacked versions, amazon, nsa etc) that your voice is sitting on now and what those devices and interfaces will look like 100 years from now and who or what will be using them, heck, even 10 years from now is a mystery.
So don't become famous, run for office or try to be big corp CEO or even use any social network because one day something you said while your echo was recording will bite you or your grandkids in the ass!
I would love to use a service like echo, it looks slick, but if I cant verify the source code or trust some community who has then it will never be in my house.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing. Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".
I wonder what sort of memory related tech it would take to pack nearly all of the internet in a small space, and have it incrementally update(the internet!) and yet write it in available memory. Besides any contact with outside world would need communication. So you can't have an entirely standalone gadget.
Minus videos and images over a certain size... not all that much. And it would compress pretty well.
I wonder if the internet archive has a record of the size required minus images.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#327Are there any open source projects trying to emulate the cloud-based voice recognition that Amazon/Google/etc are doing for Alexa/OK Google?
TensorFlow, open sourced by Google, would allow you to implement the latest in voice recognition research relatively quickly. Recently they released TensorFlow Serving which lets you run your tensorflow models on the cloud.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#328Somewhat related, but if I don't subscribe to any of the services listed, this is a pretty useless product for me. I don't listen to internet radio, I don't stream music, I don't order delivery, I don't use uber, there's already 10 million ways to check the weather, and my life isn't busy enough to need a voice-activated calendar. Is this the future of tech? Like do I need to have some kind of urban-go-getter lifesty…
Personally, I won one of these in a hackathon, never thought I would use it at all. But I set it up anyways and I found it actually very handy. Give me a news report while im cooking breakfast, timers for things, playing music. I never have used the OK Google / Siri on my phone because if I get my phone out and unlock it I might as well just open the timer app or google the question at that point, but with the echo while im doing something I can just talk and gain information about different things.
Yes you can check the weather a million ways, but those usually require some kind of dedicated screen time, watching tv, loading up a website, checking an app on your phone. Whereas with the echo you just ask it while you are doing something else and it gives you the report.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#329The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. Looking at screens to get key information distracts me from my surroundings and seems archaic. My wife is a sound designer who has opened my eyes to the importance of sounds both in film and in the world. It's not that I was unaware of sounds, but I didn't realize how important they are to centering me in this world and the made up w…
The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated. The Echo has pretty solid voice recognition--far better than anything else I've ever used--but it's still hard to get it to do anything useful once you get beyond a pretty narrow script. (e.g. what's the weather forecast, play this artist, etc.)
is it better than google voice? Siri is completely useless for me but google voice recognize everything I said (love my new iphone 6s but I wish I could say "hey siri" and it would actually work).
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
There will certainly be some aspects of the computer training the human, too. Just using this as an example, I don't know how much candlepower I want, but computers don't get bored or annoyed by my requests. I could start with 1 candlepower and move up to 10 if it's not bright enough. 100 might be too bright, so now I know what range I'm looking at. Next time I could just say "computer, 12 candlepower lighting, pleas…
I think that cuts both ways. If the computer can be trained to understand the user's intent, that seems like a better solution than forcing the user to think a different way. Which would you rather do? Be forced to state your lighting preferences in candlepower, or have the computer learn that when you say "subdued lighting", you mean "12"?
What if you could define the equivalent of Bash aliases via voice control? This would allow users to tailor their experience from the default (possibly complex/unintuitive) commands to their own personalized ones.
Example format: "Computer, define X as Y"
"Computer, define subdued lighting as set lighting to candle power twelve"
Then the VUI just adds a new entry to the voice commands where saying X results in Y.