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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?

#81

Post by oulipo »

ausjke wrote: post #52
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…

what's your business model if everyone can download and build their own image, or even re-distribute that in their own products? as far as Alexa goes, I unplugged it a few months ago and it's collecting dust now, I use my cellphone to check weather and for alarm clock instead, I don't see much use for Alexa other than those two simple tasks.

We are selling licenses for industrial makers

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

#82

Post by old-gregg »

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…

A USB microphone... That's a bummer. I was hoping that Zigbee or Z-wave based mics already exist. Do they? Every time I look at the landscape of home automation it's really hard to avoid clouds and Wifi.

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

#83

Post by Johnny555 »

kop316 wrote: post #66
cptskippy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't be willing to put an open wiretap in my home... all of their practical uses can be duplicated with the minimal effort of tapping a screen a couple of times. I've never understood this argument. Why is the portable wiretap in your pocket inherently safer?

Not the Parent commenter, but I can give some thoughts: - The phone is not designed to listen around the room explicitly, more near field, so it can't hear everything. - An iPhone seems to have pretty decent privacy settings (only the app can listen while app is open, etc) - I personally have a phone I can reflash with mostly open source software (only baseband/fivers proprietary), so I am reasonably sure that my pho…

It may not be designed to "listen around the room explicitly", but my phone makes a decent speaker phone, so it still has that capability. And to be honest, I'd be less concerned with what my Echo hears in my livingroom compared with what my phone hears all day long.

The Echo has pretty decent privacy settings (only listens when you say the "wake word", etc).

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

#84

Post by Johnny555 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #38
fortythirteen wrote: post #26

The things people are willing to give up for the most minimal of conveniences are only going to get worse in the next decade. I wouldn't be willing to put an open wiretap in my home, even if it did something amazing, like extend my lifespan. The quality of my life is not significantly improved with these devices, and all of their practical uses can be duplicated with the minimal effort of tapping a screen a couple of…

I'm seriously shocked by the number of people that are putting always on "assistants" in their home - but more so on the number of people that should know better, like HN people.

As a previous commenter said -- why are you not similarly shocked by the number of HN users that carry a remote recording (audio + video) device + GPS tracker in their pocket?

Why should I be less concerned about a mobile device that waits for me to say "Ok Google" or "Siri" than a stationary device that waits for me to say "Alexa"?

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

#86

Post by pound »

fortythirteen wrote: post #51
cptskippy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't be willing to put an open wiretap in my home... all of their practical uses can be duplicated with the minimal effort of tapping a screen a couple of times. I've never understood this argument. Why is the portable wiretap in your pocket inherently safer?

Not safer, but not there is a key difference. If I turn off voice assistant on my phone, ethically speaking , it shouldn't be recording my voice. Companies/governments doing so is an actual wire tap, and they should have a warrant. Putting these devices in your home is giving Amazon/Google/Apple permission to record your every conversation.

I don't have Alexa (though I assume it has the same), but you definitely can turn off mic on Google Home.

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

#87

Post by pdkl95 »

qvrjuec wrote: post #71
pdkl95 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So let's assume this is technically possible, and only examine the process under the lens of detectability. Assuming the codec is 8kbps, you'd see roughly 3MB upload for every hour of audio, and I would say it's not out of the question for the noise gate to be active from the television being on in the same room, or music playing. For an utterance, seeing a 3MB upstream would be super abnormal. It would be impossible…

While a noise gate is an obvious starting point, I suspect that much smarter filters are possible. A wide range of design choices are possible that trade CPU complexity accuracy. If a high error rate (including "no data") is acceptable, a filter might simply default to "off" when any unusual condition like "noise gate has been on continuously for 15 minutes" is detected.

If I was designing this kind of spyware, I would put a hard limit that cuts off uploading any "extra" data after sending some low multiple of the "legitimate" data.

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

#88

Post by leeoniya »

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…

any plans to integrate with https://www.home-assistant.io/ ?

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by bluGill »

sp332 wrote: post #34
amelius wrote: post #7

Why 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?

Mozilla is making one. The first release last year was already very good, and hopefully it will improve with time. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/a-journey-to-10-word-error...

Not exactly. Mozilla is making a good speech to text engine. (the current open source engines are based on some old academic work that is now considered not the right way forward).
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