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Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

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Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#611

Post by rdl »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #123
rdl wrote: post #104

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…

It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.

Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform.

But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#612

Post by pucke »

tialaramex wrote: post #610
eksemplar wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, from back when Scott Adams wasn’t a crazy alt-right, moon-landing conspiracy, Alex Jones loving, jerk. Or perhaps hid it better. Sorry to derail it, but I’m a millennial who grew up with Dilbert, and it just feels so wrong now. :(

Adams has been a loon for a long time, his Dilbert Future book talks about his personal philosophy which is straight up "Name it and claim it" theology except without the Jesus. Adams basically attributes all his good fortune to his own talent and hard work. And then of course that means everybody who is struggling, well those people just didn't want it enough, they aren't putting in the hard work like Adams. Frankly…

To be fair that line of think is a problem here on HN, among millenials, and among older generations as well. Americans in particular, but our species as a whole need to learn to separate the ideas of success and merit.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#614

Post by misnome »

enriquto wrote: post #604
eksemplar wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, from back when Scott Adams wasn’t a crazy alt-right, moon-landing conspiracy, Alex Jones loving, jerk. Or perhaps hid it better. Sorry to derail it, but I’m a millennial who grew up with Dilbert, and it just feels so wrong now. :(

> I’m a millennial who grew up with Dilbert, and it just feels so wrong now. There's nothing wrong in enjoying the writings of people whose political ideas you disagree with. I'd rather say that if you cannot do that, there's something wickedly wrong in you.

Hell, that’d exclude a whole load of decent sci-fi also.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#615

Post by titzer »

andreyk wrote: post #588

The explanation for this is fairly unremarkable ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/family-claims-their-echo-s... ): Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like “Alexa.” Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a “send message” request. At which point, Alexa said out loud “To whom?” At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa…

Actually it's very remarkable on how bad the voice recognition is, and how Amazon can knowingly ship this crap to people, putting it in their homes, recording their private interactions. Ya'll recorded people having sex yet?

It sounds like the machine learning models are tuned for specific phrases and have terrible, terrible false positive rates. "Evaluating options to make this less likely"? Now I don't even know what mental model you guys are using (if you are from Amazon). This shouldn't be a matter of "likelihood". But OK, fine, let's use math. AFAICT there is about a 0% chance that a human would make such a string of errors interpreting human speech, but let's call it 1 in a trillion. If you guys aren't doing better than about 1 in a trillion for this string of at least 4 interactions, then one of those terms is stupidly, stupidly high.[1] It actually interpreted random conversation as the name of someone on a contact list? Horrible.

trust--

[1] Not even to mention, a human has context, understands boundaries, preferences, and has a ML voice recognition model developed and tuned over decades of interacting with real people. A human would also be smart enough to understand the other human's situation, context, state of mind, and realize that even just the cadence of the conversation not changing in response to queries was indicative of the humans not acknowledging the query. Machines are f'in stupid.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#617

Post by DonHopkins »

Mandatum wrote: post #528
chias wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine will sometimes / often go off when I say "ok, cool". It's simultaneously amusing and annoying.

"Cocaine poodle"

[Google plays David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, and Joey Arias performing TVC15 on SNL]

https://youtu.be/ogUJ7JwkLNs?t=3m7s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVC_15

>The track was inspired by an episode in which Iggy Pop, during a drug-fueled period at Bowie’s LA home, hallucinated and believed the television set was swallowing his girlfriend. Bowie developed a story of a holographic television, TVC 15. In the song, the narrator's girlfriend crawls into the television and afterwards, the narrator desires to crawl in himself to find her.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#618

Post by bshastry »

yason wrote: post #297

I am oversimplifying here but: * install device that is designed to listen to speech in the house * the device is connected to internet * the device is capable of contacting other internet peers/services/hosts * the device knows a bit about its owner's internet presence such as contacts * the device is equipped with simple conversational user interface based on fuzzy human speech-command detection These basically bou…

you just described a smartphone

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#619

Post by a_f »

carbocation wrote: post #258
kinsomo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the coordinates to a central server. That server makes decisions on if lights should be on or if A/C should be running in that room. But I would never buy this system. I would have to make it myself. I am hopeful that open source software and hardware can produc…

Might be cool to add thermal sensors to that, so the lights don't shut off because you're not moving enough.

Could be a problem if you plan on sleeping, but you could some rules to get around that

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#620

Post by sorokod »

gnicholas wrote: post #536

Amazon's response, from Ars' article: > Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted backgro…

As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.

Would be very interesting to see the actual probabilities assigned to these "unlikelys"

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