101–110 of 734 posts
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Nevermind that we are already in a world where you can play any song you like from the wireless computer you carry in your pocket. That's not convenient enough. /s
That pocket computer also has all the same potential threats to privacy. Somehow nobody cares about them, though.
The whole point of these cylinders is to be listening at all times.
I received one of these messages just a week ago. Alexa sent me a message of my friend and his girlfriend having a private conversation. I immediately texted him to ask if he intended to do that and he did not- so weird.
Now that Alexa is available in my country, I've considered switching it over to a real account explicitly to be able to use some of these calling and messaging features. Maybe I'll wait till the bugs are worked out.
What actually happened: Alexa misinterpreted some voice commands and activated a "call" skill. The people involved and local news got very excited and escalated this into a conspiracy story. Amazon takes customer privacy EXTREMELY seriously. There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact. It also doesn't make any logical sense…
It's pretty clear to me that this was an inadvertent activation of the call skill. The equivalent of butt-dialing someone from your phone. I get random voicemails from people all the time that are clearly recordings of their phone in their pocket. If that's the case, then you need to provide additional features to reduce the chances of this happening. Longer and more unique wake word options, or more complex and deli…
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It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me. > People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this wo…
I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.
I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.
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It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me. > People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this wo…
I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.
People are volunteerelly paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.
It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me. > People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this wo…
There's no reason why your house needs to be "tapped" for either of those use cases. All those things could be accomplished without leaving your home network.
I received one of these messages just a week ago. Alexa sent me a message of my friend and his girlfriend having a private conversation. I immediately texted him to ask if he intended to do that and he did not- so weird.
Can you explain a bit more. What was the context of the message? was it an email? What was the subject line and the text? Was the audio an attachment or a link? A link to where...? "Amazon sent me a message" is so frustratingly vague...
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I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.
Why do you want to turn on white noise?
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It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me. > People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this wo…
There is a massive difference between walking a few steps to turn on a light switch (which is only useful when you are in close proximity) vs having a accurate real-time mapping functionality when on the go. Similarly, there is a massive difference in the privacy implications of listening to every conversation everyone in your home (including guests) is having vs. having your current location known. Wiretapping laws…
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I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.
Why do you want to turn on white noise?
I also live in a city, so white noise (actually brown noise) masks out tiny noises that interrupt sleep.