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Now 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.
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Yes [0]. > Unless the website operator can show that a consumer has actual knowledge of the agreement, an enforceable contract will be found based on an inquiry notice theory only if: (1) the website provides reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms to which the consumer will be bound; and (2) the consumer takes some action, such as clicking a button or checking a box, that unambiguously manifests his or her assent…
The claim there is that they never saw the terms of service updates, and thus weren't aware of an arbitration clause, rather than terms of service generally not being valid.
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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…
But my point is not just about the ease of running whisper, it's that the device is already doing transcription. Even if it's not optimal, it works.
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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.
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Don't these usually come with ToS or something that has you agreeing that they can change the service any time?
When you buy a car there is a lot of required paperwork that they don't really give you time to read, so maybe.
Now 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.
Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?
And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.
But people will put up with anything. You could literally send a note that any Alexa will be equipped with 2kg of Semtex, to be triggered in case of wrongthink in your own home. People would still use Alexa and rationalize the feature.
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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.
I should have a bit more faith but at this point I feel like the median voter might see their world getting worse but still be convinced somehow that Democrats are behind it because Republicans have their messaging on point and Democrats are doing the equivalent of a silent protest.
TL;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.
While the reason you suggest might be a good one, the repercussions of this change are clearly large. Unknowing customers now have their voice recordings sent to the cloud whoch could be leaked, have law enforcement get a warrant to take it from Amazon, or for it to be abused directly by Amazon. Those are huge. They might just have a good scapegoat.