131–140 of 734 posts
But seriously what do you more or less expect from this. Anyone littlely involved in tech will tell to throw this shit out the window.
I enjoy living dangerously.
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That pocket computer also has all the same potential threats to privacy. Somehow nobody cares about them, though.
That pocket computer can be programed to listen, or not. The whole point of these cylinders is to be listening at all times.
I feel creeped out by these home listening devices and I don't own one, but don't our phones already have this capability? You can turn "Ok Google" on on an android phone. I sometimes record audio, and the mic is incredibly good. Is there a substantial difference between our phones and these devices? EDIT: Just realized the substantial difference is that Google and Amazon own all of these things. They don't control a…
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Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. 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 ther…
It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.
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Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. 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 ther…
It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. 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 ther…
> Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.
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That’s about all we use ours for “Alexa... play white noise” “ALEXA... stop”
Do you notice that it randomly fades out and then fades back in every few hours? I don't understand why it does that.
Summary of vague technical details (which may be all we hear about this): > an Alexa engineer investigated ... they said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!" > th…
> The device did not audibly advise that it was preparing to send the recording, something it’s programmed to do. Apparently it's not programmed to do that. Unless this was a hardware glitch or cosmic-ray event.
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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…
To be fair, you can have all the maps without the location tracking; the location tracking just tells you where you are on the map.