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Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

nytimes.com

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Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#11

Post by jacquesm »

oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

> 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

Excellent! How will you guarantee that your devices will not leak data?

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#12

Post by jacquesm »

rb808 wrote: post #4

With 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 or a hack. Don't trust the manufacturers to be able to secure these devices.

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#13

Post by ryan-c »

oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

Oh, this looks cool. I was looking into building something with a respeaker not too long ago. How does your business model work that you're letting people DIY for free?

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#14

Post by oulipo »

ryan-c wrote: post #13
oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

Oh, this looks cool. I was looking into building something with a respeaker not too long ago. How does your business model work that you're letting people DIY for free?

We are selling licenses for industrial builders.

If you build something with it, we would love to hear about it and feature it on our website! Come talk to us on our Discord channel :)

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#15

Post by oulipo »

jacquesm wrote: post #11
oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

> 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 Excellent! How will you guarantee that your devices will not leak data?

We are open-sourcing the code, and people can have their own network monitoring to see that there is no data leaking

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#16

Post by cevn »

oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

I had problems setting up Snips on an RPI - couldn't figure out how to read the MQTT bus messages after I set up the audio successfully. Where do I go for help?

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#17

Post by pdkl95 »

z_open wrote: post #2

In 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 cou…

> because the main processor that was always running was primitive and was only powerful enough to pick up a key phrase

That's only true if you're trying to do complex analysis on the device. Cell phones in the early 1990s had even less computing power, but it was enough to encode speech down to 13.2 kbit/s[1] (or 5.6 kbit/s[2]). A simple noise gate[3] would reduce recording duty cycle down to maybe 1% while costing a trivial amount of CPU load.

Modern hardware - even tiny embedded devices - can probably do a lot more than simple gat4ed+compressed audio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Rate

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Rate

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_gate

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#18

Post by oulipo »

cevn wrote: post #16
oulipo wrote: post #3

You 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% o…

I had problems setting up Snips on an RPI - couldn't figure out how to read the MQTT bus messages after I set up the audio successfully. Where do I go for help?

Hi! You can either send us an issue on Github https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation/issu... or better come talk to us on our Discord channel: https://discordapp.com/invite/3939Kqx

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#19

Post by jacquesm »

oulipo wrote: post #15
jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Excellent! How will you guarantee that your devices will not leak data?

We are open-sourcing the code, and people can have their own network monitoring to see that there is no data leaking

Please check into 'reproducible builds' and ways to ensure the software is not modified between the point where you build it and the point where it gets deployed. There will most likely at some point be an attempt to use your reputation to achieve the exact opposite of your stated goals so beware of that.

Re: Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

#20

Post by shawn-butler »

pdkl95 wrote: post #8
rb808 wrote: post #4

With 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 persona…

Amazon resisted a warrant from a prosecutor seeking all Alexa recordings from a house that was the site of murder. Trial in Arkansas I believe.

I don't think it ever went anywhere precedent setting however because the defendant eventually gave permission to Amazon to turn it over.

Still pretty muddy waters. I would trust Amazon a little more than I would trust the smart tv makers, but that's just my bias.

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