Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations • Hacker News Board

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#211

Post by jononor » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

jacobsenscott wrote: post #127

What's most interesting to me is that an army of contractors is required to get even the low accuracy levels of voice recognition we have today. The "AI" revolution is pure smoke and mirrors designed entirely to bilk investors out of their dollars. There's been no improvement in "AI" in the last 50 years, except that we have a lot more data to push through the same useless models.

100 bucks for anyone who uses a 50 year model/method and get within twice the word-error-rate of today's speech recognition systems.

Also, how do you explain the progress on ImageNet challenge over the last 10 years? Each method there uses the same dataset, yet error rates (top5) have gone from 30% in 2011 to around 3% in 2016.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#212

Post by la_barba » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #104

anbop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Google PAY MONEY to generate training data or gather it from informed people? (“Make $100 by recording your voice for Google’s machine learning algorithms.”) not “Arms full with an infant? This $50 device will solve all your problems” and then shipping those recordings to third party contractors in unsecured facilities.

Maybe if you get you training data by some very different source than your real data comes from, it won't be representative and won't work very well?

We test our medicines on a small group that is representative of the entire worlds population. We build soil models based on sampling a small region. We don't test your entire blood to do a medical test. I don't know what you mean by "real data", but representative sampling is how work gets done in every single domain in the world. Google can do this.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#213

Post by cblades » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

gringoDan wrote: post #95

I think the responses to this can be broken down into a 2x2 matrix: level of concern vs. understanding of technology. 1) Don't understand ML; not concerned - "I have nothing to hide." 2) Don't understand ML; concerned - "I bought this device and now people are spying on me!" 3) Understand ML; not concerned - "Of course, Google needs to label its training data." 4) Understand ML; concerned - "How can we train models/c…

I agree, but I think this issue is incredibly mishandled by reporting. The title in the linked article being a great example.

There is absolutely no proof of number 2 in your list, but that is by far the widest-held belief.

It's infuriating, because we can't have a useful societal dialog about the issue if the largest chunk of concerned people are, essentially, conspiracy theorist.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#214

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

asciident wrote: post #63

kypro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit op-ins? "Google would like to use the last 15 minutes of voice data to improve Google Home. This may contain sensitive information. Do you approve?"

Everyone would just decline because there's no incentive to agree, and their product would die. Plus it would annoy users and cause stress.

Not necessarily. I've had Google Voice (And maybe iphone?) ask me if they can use my voice-mail to improve transcription data, and I always say yes. But it's an explicit ask for each time (If I remember correctly), which is nice.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#215

Post by la_barba » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

amacneil wrote: post #33

Serious question: how do people think the ML models for Home, Alexa, Siri, etc are trained, if not with human labeling?

The ethical way to do this is to pay a representative sample of your customers to come in and record their voice.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#216

Post by thekyle » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

groovybits wrote: post #130

lovetocode wrote: post #108

I own 4 Home Minis, 1 Home and 2 Home hubs I honestly don't care so long as my data is used to improve the functionality and stability of my investment. It is quite another thing if they are selling my conversations to third-party vendors.

Per article: > The man, who wants to remain anonymous, works for an international company hired by Google. His job is to listen to the audio clips and to write out what he hears, so that Google can improve the speech assistant. So, > It is quite another thing if they are selling my conversations to third-party vendors. That is exactly what Google is doing.

You really have to twist the definition of the word "selling" to say that Google is selling data to their contracted workers.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#217

Post by thekyle » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

Maximus9000 wrote: post #42

gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Pay beta testers who know what they're signing up for? Train the software with previously human transcribed audio (like TV/audiobooks/etc)

> Train the software with previously human transcribed audio (like TV/audiobooks/etc)

They've very likely already done this.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#218

Post by skybrian » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #195

skybrian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also compare this to hospitals sending voice files to India to be transcribed. This is not automated at all. It's not clear that hospitals are any better at getting informed consent for this than Google. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription

1) A person going into a hospital, having their voice recorded, and then having the recording sent to another hospital where it might help treat and/or save their lives vs 2) A company exploiting the lack of regulation and public knowledge/education on the dangers of mining personal data, to mine personal data and make a profit with no regard for the safety of the individual If explicit consent had to be obtained, wi…

You raise safety concerns. What risks do you have in mind?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#219

Post by Medicalidiot » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #166

noir_lord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aldous Huxley got there earlier with A Brave New World as well. Speculative Fiction was ahead of the curve in that era.

Anyone want to recommend a book? Let me join in by suggesting the Asimov robot books, which I’ve just begun

Brave New World by far is the most accurate book to date of what the modern world looks like. That's my strongest recommendation.

Fahrenheit 451 is also a solid read.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#220

Post by RosanaAnaDana » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

la_barba wrote: post #212

tbrownaw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you get you training data by some very different source than your real data comes from, it won't be representative and won't work very well?

We test our medicines on a small group that is representative of the entire worlds population. We build soil models based on sampling a small region. We don't test your entire blood to do a medical test. I don't know what you mean by "real data", but representative sampling is how work gets done in every single domain in the world. Google can do this.

Yeah no.

Representative sampling is how we formerly did this kind of work. It wasn't particularly good or effective, but we didn't have the methods or compute to go beyond that. No longer.