Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
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Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#2In past discussions, I was led to believe we were safe from these devices, in terms of pervasive data collection, because the main processor that was always running was primitive and was only powerful enough to pick up a key phrase. This phrase would power the main processor which would then listen to your query, respond, and then deactivate. But now, as the article mentions, I realize that this initial processor could be made to listen for many key words like "love", "hate", or other words that would pick up on sensitive personal information. I really don't think these devices should exist.
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#3You can't trust the large companies who have a culture of profiting off your data to protect your privacy.
This is why we need AI at the edge, and not in the clouds, and Privacy-by-design thinking in our architectures. This is the only way for people to know their data won't be compromised and misused, because it never leaves their devices.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of https://snips.ai and we are building a 100% on-device and private-by-design platform to build Voice AI assistants
We would be happy to know what you do with it! You can take a look at what some people have built with it already https://github.com/snipsco/awesome-snips
We are open-sourcing it over time, starting with the NLU: https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-nlu-is-an-open-source-priv.... Snips is available in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean with more European languages coming this year.
You can start building your own private-by-design smart speaker on the platform in under 1h with this tutorial: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#4With a court order can authorities turn on the microphone and just listen to everything? Seems easy to do but I haven't heard about it yet. I guess phones can do the same. Presumably the Russians and Chinese do this already. :)
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#5> including an “algorithmic transparency requirement” that would help people understand how their data was being used and what automated decisions were then being made about them.
This needs to be required for any type of algorithmic decision making. Without algorithmic transparency ulterior motives, intentional or unintentional biases, and unnoticed mistakes are hidden from public review.
A common response is that we don't know how some types of machine learning make their decisions. I agree this is occasionally true. Find a way generate an explanation, or use a different algorithm; transparency is a critical requirement.
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#6[deleted]
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#7Why don't we have open-source voice-assistants yet? I mean, if we can have an open-source OS (e.g. Linux), then surely we can have open-source speech recognition, right?
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#8With a court order can authorities turn on the microphone and just listen to everything? Seems easy to do but I haven't heard about it yet. I guess phones can do the same. Presumably the Russians and Chinese do this already. :)
A warrant is required only as long as "voice assistant" technology "is not in general public use"[1]. Kyllo v United States created a bright-line[3] test that removes the warrant requirement to see "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion"[2] when use of the technology is normalized.
Note that this removes the warrant requirement in general, even if you personally don't own an Alexa/etc. The test is if the public expects audio in the home might be recorded and sent to a 3rd party. If the answer is "yes", then the police can use their own hardware to do the recording.
[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html
[2] Ibid.
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#9Why don't we have open-source voice-assistants yet? I mean, if we can have an open-source OS (e.g. Linux), then surely we can have open-source speech recognition, right?
Voice assistants are difficult, both electro-acoustically to get a good clean voice signal from the ambient room noise and voice-assistant generated audio (this is called barge-in), as well as the software to actually parse that speech. A great open-source voice-assistant is ambitious.
But why isn't there a great open-source version of any $iot_appliance? IOT, in general, is crawling with companies that are looking for a monthly cash flow, and are therefore creating an ecosystem of non-federated, walled garden type devices that report back to some central server to keep the user dependent upon and paying monthly cash to some company. All of these IOT projects are generally simpler than voice-assistants, and I look forward to the day when we have IOT projects that talk to each other or a local server, without linking us to some company forever.
Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?
#10Why don't we have open-source voice-assistants yet? I mean, if we can have an open-source OS (e.g. Linux), then surely we can have open-source speech recognition, right?
We are building this at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder). You can build 100% on-device Voice AI assistants which are running on a Raspberry Pi 3, and we are open-sourcing the platform
You can take a look at our blog to get started if you want to build your own assistant: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...