Acoustic fingerprinting sounds like an excellent method to begin identifying anyone and everyone who utters a sentence around one of Amazon’s spy toys.
Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
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Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
And losing their GPS to boot
Airplane mode AFAIK (and seems to be confirmed online and in my own experience) does not disable GPS.
GPS itself, no, but phones will pick up geolocation data through cell towers and most turn-by-turn directions use data connections. Though I've never driven in airplane mode so I don't know how well it actually works.
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#113So they’re training Alexa not to recognize the specific recording. I’m wondering if this has any side effects for the actors from those ads: if they have an Alexa at home, does it (sometimes) fail to recognize them? (And wouldn’t it be cool, if somewhat dystopian, if Alexas all over the US quipped “hey, that’s my big sister on the TV!”?)
I wonder what sort of technical debt the Alexa team is racking up by putting in hacks like this.
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#114An older article, and specifically about their Super Bowl ads, but a fascinating answer to a question I had directly from the source at Amazon.
For anyone who's curious, it's typical for Alexa to respond to pre-recorded mentions of her name. Last night, ours woke to "Alex" while watching The Traitors . (Speaking of being intrusive, lately Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities to the point that my kids asked me to fire her. It's looking like Siri + Homebridge will allow me to do that.)
While I heartily recommend you to explore other options, there's a solution to that infuriating behaviour: https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone who's curious, it's typical for Alexa to respond to pre-recorded mentions of her name. Last night, ours woke to "Alex" while watching The Traitors . (Speaking of being intrusive, lately Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities to the point that my kids asked me to fire her. It's looking like Siri + Homebridge will allow me to do that.)
While I heartily recommend you to explore other options, there's a solution to that infuriating behaviour: https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895
Thanks! I found it a few messages down: "Alexa, stop 'By The Way'"
Alexa will then reply, "I will snooze my suggestions…for now." (The foreboding pause was implied.)
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
While plausible on paper, it's not practical unless they jam an order of magnitude or two more compute into the devices. To get reasonable accuracy (i.e., enough to be able to use for profit) from any casual speech, the current models run far from realtime on a modern MacBook. You're not going to squeeze reasonable accuracy from the tiny processor on the devices in the world today, even if you record and process asyn…
> While plausible on paper, it's not practical unless they jam an order of magnitude or two more compute into the devices. To get reasonable accuracy (i.e., enough to be able to use for profit) from any casual speech, the current models run far from realtime on a modern MacBook. You're not going to squeeze reasonable accuracy from the tiny processor on the devices in the world today, even if you record and process as…
It kind of does matter, actually. Lots of English (and other words!) sound the same. A cat lover who starts getting ads for baseball bats and fat loss pills isn't going to convert. Context matters, too, not just matching words. If I start talking about "my dear father" and get ads for tractors and hunting gear, I'm not going to convert.
Advertisers aren't going to pay for random spoken keywords anyway. They're going to pay to target people by demographic and interest. Things _about_ you, not things you're talking about. Just because I mentioned tampons doesn't mean I'll ever buy a box of tampons (I simply lack the anatomy). And if you start building a profile about somebody based on poorly-overheard bits of speech, you're building a castle on bad foundations. The data is bunk.
Just having a TV or radio on near the device will have suddenly poisoned the data.
> If the device picks up 3 hours of speech per day, it only needs to process at 1/8x speed to catch up.
The Echo currently has a 32-bit processor that is designed to be pretty minimal. OpenAI Whisper tiny runs at about 2/3 speed. That's with a 6-core ~2.3ghz laptop processor. The CPU in the Echo runs 0.6-1ghz, and the system is not designed for general purpose computing. I don't have the ability to benchmark it, but you're not going to get close to 1/8 with the Echo hardware.
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#117They could have done it easier with a simple notch filter. Basically completely remove a frequency that doesn't affect intelligibility for ad purposes, and Alexa ignores anything with that frequency notched out.
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#118If you like to learn more about the fingerprint internals on an Echo smart speaker, checkout Section II -> Alexa Internals -> Acoustic Fingerprints in the paper at https://unacceptable-privacy.github.io
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Siri is triggered by so many words and phrases. Serious. Basically. Make sure it. Series. The worst part is that when it’s triggered, it refuses to shut up and be canceled. Siri is the laughing stock of the “AI assistants” space.
To be fair, you have to say 'hey' before any of those. There aren't many times in normal conversation when one would say 'Hey serious', or 'Hey series'.
You’d think an explicit “hey” was needed, but my daily experience makes clear that any sequence of sound even vaguely approximating something remotely sounding like “hey siri” will trigger Siri.
Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far more people have smart phones using one of 2 OSes, and unlike smart home devices, people generally take these with them wherever they go - to the store, to the bathroom, to sleep, to the doctors office, etc. Do you think cell phones are trojan horses too?
You don't? * How many apps ask for location data and background location data, when the use case for such permissions are questionable. * Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS. * Law enforcement has access to a variety of tools that track individuals based on their cellphones. [0] * Google Maps requires an incredible amount of connectivity…
> How many apps ask for location data and background location data, when the use case for such permissions are questionable.
On Android anything that can be used to deduce location, including Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. is lumped in the location permission, which can be answered with "only while using the app" or "only once".
> We still don't have end-to-end encryption for basic communication protocols such as SMS.
Because SMS is a legacy protocol that needs to maintain backwards compatiblity, so bolting on encryption is extremely complex for literally no gain - chat messaging apps with better UX, and sometimes even end to end encryption, are a dime a dozen.