Am I supposed to have sympathy for people who bought a home snooping device now realizing they're going to be snooped on?
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The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
51–60 of 696 posts
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#52TL;DR Alexa will be cloud-only very soon because it'll be powered by an LLM, which is too big to run on a smart speaker.
That doesn't explain anything. LLMs use text as input. This feature already transcribes locally and sends text to the cloud.
LLM can take audio as input, e.g. Gemini 2.0 Flash can take audio as input and is very fast and cheap (costs 25 audio tokens for a second, and prices $0.1 for 1 million input tokens).
But I get your point that e.g. whisper is also very good and can run fast locally on edge devices. We also have recently phi4-multimodal LLM that is 5.6B params and is good enough to do inference locally on beefy smartphones. Problem is probably those smart speakers have really low CPU/GPU. Also LLM with audio input probably can be better re WER and take your mood/emotion into account when doing inference.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#53The PM who asked for this deserves to be arrested
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#54Always assumed Amazon was doing whatever it wanted with Alexa powered devices. I used to have one in the kitchen that I used mainly for timers. The mute button stayed on 99.999% of the time. Needing to unmute to start or stop timers did make it a bit less useful but it was fine.
I watched a breakdown of that model of Echo where it looked like the mute was indeed at the hardware level. My EE knowledge is limited but good enough I could follow along. Amazon probably could hide some hidden way to get around the hardware switch if they wanted but the risk for them seems higher than the risk to me, which never really was more than they'd hear me belch while cooking.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#55TL;DR Alexa will be cloud-only very soon because it'll be powered by an LLM, which is too big to run on a smart speaker.
It's depressing that this hadn't happened years ago, neither for legal nor ethical reasons.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#56My first tought was in this direction: Amazon’s Echo hardware can be hacked to run your own local voice assistant that never touches the cloud. This involves replacing or modifying the Echo’s firmware to break free of Amazon’s servers, then installing offline voice recognition and AI tools on your local network.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#57Now would be a good time to have a functional FTC commissioner. Doing a bait and switch like on a product that was sold with a set of features should be illegal. If I buy a car and the sales guy stops by my house the next day to take back the wheels, it would rightfully be seen as ridiculous.
America's lack of customer protection will hurt continue hurting its people. Ladies and gentlemen, please do something about it.
I’m afraid the only thing we can do at this point is gun for an economic depression, ride out three years of that just like with Hoover (1929–33), and upgrade to New Deal 2.0 beta. There’s no amount of protests that can convince the median Trump voter that anything is wrong in America unless it affects him personally. And no amount of protest will convince Trump that he has made a single mistake in his entire life.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#58I switched to Home Assistant a couple months ago (because I didn't like the idea of my voice being sent to amazon constantly) and haven't looked back! Soo much more you can do (including immediately using an LLM, if you like, whether in the cloud or local), and so much more control.
Home Assistant is a great example of the amazing things the open source community is capable of doing. Hopefully they get the color version stuff worked out. It's too bad it appears that most of Amazon's hardware devices can't be turned to the good side and made to work with Home Assistant.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#59My first tought was in this direction: Amazon’s Echo hardware can be hacked to run your own local voice assistant that never touches the cloud. This involves replacing or modifying the Echo’s firmware to break free of Amazon’s servers, then installing offline voice recognition and AI tools on your local network.
Do you have a link? Last time I looked a couple of years ago, Amazon's hardware was too locked down to be used for anything other than Amazon's services.
Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't these usually come with ToS or something that has you agreeing that they can change the service any time?
I always wonder how valid these actually are. There's probably a reasonable range. Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable. The bit about changing terms of service probabl…
What you’re describing is that ToS cannot exonerate them from breaking other laws. Which is correct.
However the question is whether other laws have been broken in the first place.