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The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

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Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#581

Post by worik »

mintplant wrote: post #547
seltzered_ wrote: post #513

Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how "I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization." The comment further talks about the mute button on the orig…

Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that' s a hardware mute.

> physically scraped out the MEMS microphones.

I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#582

Post by worik »

simpaticoder wrote: post #403
everdrive wrote: post #186

People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart ph…

>People don't really care about privacy People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.) This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism,…

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

I do not think so

I think freedom

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#583

Post by Semaphor »

xandrius wrote: post #540
Semaphor wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at yes, convert, rarely. Partially because getting Alexa to do it is so convenient and quick. I really need to continue setting up voice for HA.

I just dump it into chatgpt and get it done in a sec

I lack trust in ai to trust them to get volumetric to weight conversions right

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#584

Post by simpaticoder »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #548
everdrive wrote: post #186

People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart ph…

This argument, "People don't really care about ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier. It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care. When the supplier chooses no…

"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them.

What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.

There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.

The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#585

Post by arcrwlock »

elif wrote: post #475
draugadrotten wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am switching out the Alexas in the house to the home assistant voice devices, which can leverage a local LLM without any cloud whatsoever https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.

" Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”? A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ... " They hardcoded the wake words in hardware... Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purpose…

Because then you'd be running a full speech to text model all the time, and an LLM any time any speech is detected.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#586

Post by greycol »

elif wrote: post #475
draugadrotten wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am switching out the Alexas in the house to the home assistant voice devices, which can leverage a local LLM without any cloud whatsoever https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.

" Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”? A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ... " They hardcoded the wake words in hardware... Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purpose…

They actually have thought it out well. The short of it is you can set up a device to constantly stream to home assistant so that you can use any wake word. That comes with the draw back of more power use and more importantly higher cpu use for each microphone you add. It's still possible (https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord)

The alternative for a dedicated low power device is to have trained a model to run on smaller micro controllers so that it can run locally on low powered devices (https://github.com/kahrendt/microWakeWord) this is what they have chosen for their dedicated devices.

This choice also comes with much higher default privacy. Which is great as home assistant offers cloud integration and the fact that they put privacy first in this area makes it much easier to trust they do the right thing in other areas.

A brief run down on the subject https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/about_wake_word/

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#587

Post by mvdtnz »

divbzero wrote: post #566
eitally wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting because I remember interviewing a UX manager candidate at Google around 2019 who was coming from the Alexa team at Amazon, and his feedback even then was that Alexa was never going to be profitable and that he -- and many others -- were trying to get out while the getting was good. It, just like Google Assistant, is just suffering a very slow death.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#588

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

mintplant wrote: post #547
seltzered_ wrote: post #513

Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how "I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization." The comment further talks about the mute button on the orig…

Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that' s a hardware mute.

Is it really smart if you've removed the ability for it to respond to voice commands ?

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#589

Post by DanHulton »

kzrdude wrote: post #572
divbzero wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.

"They" or in this case, Apple, has. This is largely why the latest Siri AI enhancements went over so poorly. Hallucinations when trying to get important personal data or accomplish important tasks are not viewed terribly fondly.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#590

Post by kazinator »

kzrdude wrote: post #572
divbzero wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.

They have. You can switch your Android phone from the old Google Assistant to Gemini. I don't like it, so I use Gemini separately by going to the Gemini URL, leaving the assistant as is. It may be dumb, but it's useful. Just like you wouldn't replace your Bash with a GUI, at least not for some values of 'you'.
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