It wasn't long ago that people were up in arms about the Xbox One sending audio back to Microsoft in order to implement voice commands. In the time since this kind of thing seems to have become acceptable or even mundane. What is it that changed? It's not as if big tech has become more trustworthy in recent years.
Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
311–320 of 424 posts
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#312I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I remember when people used location tracking as a reason to not own a cell phone. I'm talking about flip phones, mind you, not even iPhones with GPS receivers. I recall the bulk of complaints in that vein died down around the time Google Maps for phones came out. If…
There's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, th…
Aside from the usefulness: True, my GPS data can be used to trace information about me (where I eat, who I meet, which doctor or prostitute I visit etc.) however I believe that conversation I have attached home are more private and reveal notably more about me than those things derived from GPS as I might discuss the exact condition and state or explicit preferences in other regards.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#313I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms. Some are considered tech people who should know stuff like this could happen, but they just don't care or don't think it will happen to them. Somewhere there is an ex-Stasi officer who is thinking "I wish we were that good and had people fooled to voluntarily install listening devi…
This is exactly why we are building the first 100% on-device and private-by-design open-source Voice AI at https://snips.ai (and we have cloud-matching performances: https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-brings-cloud-level-spoken-... ) Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder We believe that people want more natural interaction and AI at home, but that it should never be at the cost of their privacy. You never know what a company, o…
Are you working on making actual hardware like smart speakers?
I'm only asking because this would definitely help spread this kind of platform. Raspberry 3, despite being great, is not something the average Joe will mess it.
There needs to be a physical product with Snip.ai on it that people can put in their home. Something sleek and well designed, not some Rasp 3 in a case with some mic attached with duct tape.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compare the workflows for leaving a reminder or note. Before: * Find phone/computer * Unlock * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector * Invoke note-taking or reminder app * Type in note or reminder * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface * Commit note/reminder Or: * Locate notebook * Locate writing utensil * Open notebook to current page * Write note * Remember to check notebook every t…
* Find phone/computer * Unlock * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector * Invoke note-taking or reminder app * Type in note or reminder * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface * Commit note/reminder I just now took a stopwatch to time how long it took me to do all of this: 30 seconds, and 20 of those were walking to my office. That is not a negligible amount of time, but it's not a huge…
I think the key difference is the focused attention and brain bandwidth to spend. Traditional way is way more efficient but requires more of that - you need to do a relatively long sequence of actions, coordinated to the goal. Using voice, there is no sequence, and it doesn't matter how many times you need to try and to repeat the same simple phrase - you spend no additional bandwidth with every repeat.
The voice way is like writing the simple add-mupltiply loop in C, and UI way is like writing the same in assembly (using vector extensions). Assuming you know how to do it very well, writing assembly code for that loop wouldn't be even longer to do. And you don't have a 100% chance the compiler will do the right thing with unrolling and vectorizing in this particular case, but most of the time you check the output and try another compiler options until it do the right thing, and only after a bunch of tries you finally resort to assembly. That's basic energy-conserving optimization present in people's firmware in their brain.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, th…
Aside from the usefulness: True, my GPS data can be used to trace information about me (where I eat, who I meet, which doctor or prostitute I visit etc.) however I believe that conversation I have attached home are more private and reveal notably more about me than those things derived from GPS as I might discuss the exact condition and state or explicit preferences in other regards.
Much more likely to want to discuss things in your home that are outside the Overton window and don't want recorded than accidentally go somewhere that you wouldn't want people to know about.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#316I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I remember when people used location tracking as a reason to not own a cell phone. I'm talking about flip phones, mind you, not even iPhones with GPS receivers. I recall the bulk of complaints in that vein died down around the time Google Maps for phones came out. If…
Mass privacy invasion is probably one of today's trends that our descendants will look back on and say "what were they thinking?" Another example for comparison would be 1950s-60s mass atmospheric nuclear testing. Societies regularly undergo bouts of either really extreme political corruption or mass insanity (or sometimes both at once). All this mass surveillance is going to be a blast next time we have a Hitler, Po…
>Mass privacy invasion is probably one of today's trends that our descendants will look back on and say "what were they thinking?"
I'm not sure about that. The slope is not going to change direction, so it's only going to get worse. The newer generations will look back and go "what was the problem the old timers were complaining about, besides getting off their lawn?" I have a kid that just missed out being part of the millennial group. She already thinks I'm a curmudgeon about things. By the time she has a kid, privacy will just be a word to learn the definition to understand what people were talking about as it's simply not going to be a concept they care about. Maybe one more gen later.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#317Didn't Amazon tell it's customers, that Alexa constantly records locally, but only sends the words after the "Alexa" magic, including 6 seconds before and 6 seconds after it, to the servers?
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Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't believe that so many people, especially the ones on tech sites like this, bought into the idea that speech recognition is such a hard job that it needs to be run on the supercomputers of tech giants. We had somewhat decent voice dictation software on desktops 20 years ago, when 100Mhz processors and 32MB of RAM were top of the line, yet now it's impossible with an order of magnitude more resources.
The main reason this kind of thing is outsourced to the cloud nowadays is because of deep neural network voice recognition technologies we have. Most of these models are too hefty to run inference on-device. Also, online learning allows for STT to get better as it’s used more if it’s centralized in a place like the cloud.
My iPhone runs machine vision on my phone at night (locked, plugged in, on wifi) to determine which people are in which photos. My iPhone.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#319Didn't Amazon tell it's customers, that Alexa constantly records locally, but only sends the words after the "Alexa" magic, including 6 seconds before and 6 seconds after it, to the servers?
There is nothing in this article that disproves that; and it likely would be featuring prominently if it were more.
Also, it seems quite silly for Amazon to lie about this if it could be disproved with a GDPR request.
The mistake that was made here is that the wrong customer's data was sent in a GDPR request.
Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reason this kind of thing is outsourced to the cloud nowadays is because of deep neural network voice recognition technologies we have. Most of these models are too hefty to run inference on-device. Also, online learning allows for STT to get better as it’s used more if it’s centralized in a place like the cloud.
My iPhone runs machine vision on my phone at night (locked, plugged in, on wifi) to determine which people are in which photos. My iPhone.
That's true. I didn't realize that when I wrote my comment (from an iPhone, haha).