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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

#611

Post by hn_acc1 »

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…

Yeah, companies are like that - they'll lie and pretend to be "the good guys" at the start, right up until they're not and change their motto to something besides "don't be evil".

As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.

I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..

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

#612

Post by pphysch »

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…

Cynically, much of the "privacy" industry is just a red herring by big tech / data broker industry to normalize how egregious their privacy violations are.

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

#613

Post by timwis »

serial_dev wrote: post #101
timwis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean color version? As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!

I'd love to de-amazon (neuter) my Alexa's, and somehow flash custom firmware on it. We have some devices around the house, and switching to the linked Home Assistant Voice would be a significant expense now.

You can get an atom echo for $13, if that helps: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...

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

#614

Post by joquarky »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #611
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…

Yeah, companies are like that - they'll lie and pretend to be "the good guys" at the start, right up until they're not and change their motto to something besides "don't be evil". As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineer…

> right up until they're not

In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.

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

#615

Post by munk-a »

SahAssar wrote: post #608
munk-a wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea - I don't think voice commands are a feature particularly desired for speakers. There are only a few instances I can think of where I want my speaker to respond to voice commands - when I'm in the shower and when I want it to be silent so I can take a call being the primary ones. For the former I think just having a playlist on shuffle is good enough and the for the latter there are better solutions available by…

So what you wanted was a wireless speaker? I think when most people say "smart speaker" they mean a speaker that they can control using the speaker itself, so not just a speaker tethered via bluetooth/wifi.

Considering the only apparent difference between the two is method of control and people love complaining about voice analysis miscomprehending I doubt there is much distance between those two terms in most consumers minds. I think in general marketing loves slapping "smart" in front of other nouns and it's usually received a lot worse than they expect to the point where most consumers ignore it as much as other fluff terms like "Next Gen".

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

#616

Post by timwis »

mixermachine wrote: post #112
timwis wrote: post #23

I 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.

We mostly use Alexa for playing music (Radio & Spotify) and setting timers. We also use the multi-room music feature where Alexa plays the same audio source on a certain group (great for parties). Does Home Assistant also have these features?

I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..

This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...

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

#617

Post by timwis »

wccrawford wrote: post #179
timwis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean color version? As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!

Home Assistant has physical hardware labeled "green" and "yellow". Beyond that, I assume there's some confusion about what each can and can't do? I certainly can't remember which is which... But I don't actually own one.

Ah, yeah, it was confusing to me when I was trying to get started as well! fortunately, the folks in the hardware channel of their Discord are super helpful.

Here's what I learnt: Green is the new plug and play server. Easiest to setup and will cover the vast majority of what you'll want to do. Yellow is basically green with a couple extra things built in (namely zigbee and thread), plus expansion bays, if you anticipate building on to it, but it requires you to flash it so less user friendly setup but easy if you're a dev.

But most people start out by using an old laptop or PC sitting around. That's what I did, the got a yellow.

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

#618

Post by timwis »

stogot wrote: post #454
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.

How many hours did you spend on this? I want to do it, but I don’t have much time.

For what it's worth, I was worried about that as well, but I found it to be _fun_, and I actually look forward to playing with it, even before bed. Weird, I know, but I'm enjoying it and didn't think I would.

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

#619

Post by forgetfreeman »

AlexandrB wrote: post #471
forgetfreeman wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

While increases in GDP don't all go to working class Americans, the two are not completely decoupled either. If you look at the small-scale variations in both they match each other pretty closely. I also suspect that it's the working class that would eat any dramatic GDP decrease.

We can at least agree that the working class would be on the receiving end of the worst of the consequences for any flavor of economic downsizing, just like they have been during every other recession, market crash, etc. to date. I would however like to suggest not letting yourself get distracted by the fact that the two lines kinda wiggle similarly. That massive and growing pie slice where the two decoupled is absolutely the larger issue.

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

#620

Post by DFHippie »

kevincox wrote: post #225
DFHippie wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It effectively died a long time before that.

I have no idea what you mean. The executive branch didn't routinely ignore court orders and disregard the constraints set out in the Constitution before that date. The government broke laws, but it was a scandal when it did and people -- the perpetrators, not random civil servants doing the jobs they were hired to do -- got fired for it and sometimes jailed. Now it's just another day that ends in y.

In theory Biden could have taken the SCOTUS grant of immunity to disregard the Constitution as Musk and Trump are doing, but he didn't. Trump's taking power was a step change.

We still have laws, but the executive branch under Musk/Trump regards them as mere words on a page. They bind others, not them.

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