Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#321

Post by jancsika » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #207

madrox wrote: post #104

I'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…

> 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.

You're underplaying it in order to artificially inflate your mileage.

Having a voice assistant means not having to learn to change application contexts inside an operating system follwed by a few seconds typing. You are ignoring the hundreds/thousands of hours you've spent learning which software is appropriate for which contexts. Not to mention the latency of instantiating them, or possibly even installing them, migrating data between them, etc.

Voice assistants have contexts but they map fairly closely to natural language. And non-technical users can teach other non-technical users what those contexts are. "Here's how you set an alarm." I've never used Alexa but I'd bet it's something like, "Set an alarm for blah," or even, "Wake me up at blah." And I bet if I asked an Alexa user how to do that I'll remember because it's all natural language. That's a huge win for usability.

Now try teaching a non-technical user about cron, its flags, and its relationship to other shell commands, using natural language. In a decade that bullshit will sound more antiquated than the amplitude modulation on the voice of a Dalek.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#322

Post by int_19h » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

enturn wrote: post #307

jacquesm wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason Google maps should be an online service.

I'm fairly sure if you have the app on your phone you can download the map data and use it offline unless it changed (It's been a while since I've done it).

They expire in about a month, and then the app will refuse to let you use that data. You should treat it as a cache, not as an offline map.

If you want true offline map, you'd need to use Bing, HERE or OSM.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#323

Post by glennpratt » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:53 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #264

saulrh wrote: post #252

Earlier 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've never had Google Assistant fail on something that trivial.

And as the type of person who has always struggled with calendars and notes apps, it's really valuable to me.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#324

Post by ringshall » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 3:53 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #260

wwweston wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Credulous" is the boring existing term, I think. I might enjoy "barnummark" or "candidable." Some might use the term "optimist" in this sense. Whether it's fair or unfair to call them cynics is left as an exercise for the reader.

None of those words have the same bite, in that they don't imply the belief is unfounded and probably wrong.

Credulous does, at least to me. I've always considered it a pejorative term.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#325

Post by andrepd » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:00 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #321

lisper wrote: post #207

Earlier 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…

> 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. You're underplaying it in order to artificially inflate your mileage. Having a voice assistant means not having to learn to change application contexts inside an operating system follwed by a few seconds typing. You are ignoring the hundred…

>You are ignoring the hundreds/thousands of hours you've spent learning which software is appropriate for which contexts.

Please elaborate. What do you mean by "thousands of hours of learning". Aren't you overplaying it to fit your narrative?

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#326

Post by snibsss » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #104

I'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…

Why the fuck do they need to be networked?

Don't give me some bullshit answer about, "Oh, search, oh the web..."

And don't give me that bullshit about, "Oh, but natural language processing needs computational power that won't fit in your pocket."

I only need the internet for a few specific things.

The things I could use a voice interface aren't hard, and don't always involve the internet.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#327

Post by mokus » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

matte_black wrote: post #258

bzbarsky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your list is missing "pro-democracy advocates", "Muslims", "Christians", "Jews", "atheists", "women who want an abortion", "people trying to escape an abusive relationship", "people with interesting medical conditions", etc, depending on location. Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.

If you live under a government where those examples are a reason to hide, then in the eyes of that government you are technically a criminal. Doesn’t describe my government. Even under the most oppressive governments though, there will still be a sizable majority that doesn’t have anything to hide and can feel secure using most technology, and they’ll be fine.

> Doesn’t describe my government.

This mindset seems to be why the US political parties keep handing each other more and more federal power. Nobody can imagine their nation would be so stupid as to ever put the Other Guys back in power again.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#328

Post by pard68 » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:30 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #246

binomialxenon wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can get data from the internet, I think the point is that it "lives" on-device and hence can be interacted with offline, unlike Siri/Alexa/Cortana which live entirely on the company's servers.

Siri/Alexa/Cortana are assistants, while the part you are talking about is speech recognition. Sure, it’s great that this is done offline, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to more services because at that point you do need to get data from the internet just like any other service.

I would say your comment was the unfair one. Sure, it cannot tell the weather without internet. But it can still do plenty of more important home automation functions, namely automation. No one owns one of these home assistants for it to tell the weather. You get it for controlling other devices with your voice and this can do that without access to thr world wide web.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#329

Post by craftyguy » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #321

lisper wrote: post #207

Earlier 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…

> 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. You're underplaying it in order to artificially inflate your mileage. Having a voice assistant means not having to learn to change application contexts inside an operating system follwed by a few seconds typing. You are ignoring the hundred…

It doesn't take "thousands of hours" to learn how to launch a web browser and type some words into a search engine box.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#330

Post by m0zg » Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #318

applecrazy wrote: post #263

Earlier 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.

Your iPhone is also a $1k device that's faster than some laptops. And it still cant do convincing on-device text to speech a-la Google Tacotron, and its NLU capabilities _even in the cloud_ leave much to be desired.