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I'm a little frustrated at the moment -- The future is arriving with voice controlled devices, yet I don't trust any of these companies with my words.
> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
I grow tired of this pathetic baseless fear mongering every single time anything is posted with voice control. You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!" In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. If you had been paying attention to the mobile scene even a little bit you'd know that this is on-chip lis…
Then, at $199, I might have bitten. Today, doesn't seem interesting, considering I can use a smart phone for any of this.
This sounds like the creepiest tech product you could put in your home: an internet-connected microphone that can "hear you from across the room". Love the slick design, but I'll pass.
The Xbox kinect already does this AND records video, millions of gamers own one as well.
> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
I grow tired of this pathetic baseless fear mongering every single time anything is posted with voice control. You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!" In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. If you had been paying attention to the mobile scene even a little bit you'd know that this is on-chip lis…
That means that it is ALWAYS listening. It needs to listen for that trigger word at all times.
> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
I'd still be interested, if and only if, the "wake word" processing is done locally and it THEN sends the recording that occurred after the wake word up to the cloud. If it is the case that even the wake word processing is done in the cloud, non-starter for all the reasons you state.
Consumers are frighteningly amenable to reducing their security in favor of convenience. Often they are oblivious to the tradeoff altogether. Evidence of this trend has increased since 9/11, as increasingly paranoid legislation made its way through congress at the behest of corporate stakeholders. It should hardly be surprising that now, with the NSA privileged enough to be openly flaunting its surveillance, those same corporate stakeholders are investing in companies that sell listening devices to millions of Americans. I am making a paranoid argument, but it's not ungrounded, and certainly not surprising, because paranoia breeds paranoia. Pass paranoid legislation, face a paranoid populace. The American people are rightfully skeptical of their government.
Perhaps it sounds absurd to segment the world into the "populace" and "government," but did it sound absurd when you read those terms in high school history books? Over spans of centuries, politics is viewed in the same terms: the people, and the government. Maybe you and I do not think of ourselves in the context of centuries. But what about Barack Obama? Vladimir Putin? It seems logical to assume they see themselves in the context of world leaders past. Modern leaders occupy unprecedented seats of power over the largest populace ever. If they are internally comparing themselves to each other and their predecessors, then we have a problem. We cannot trust the world leaders, because they do not view themselves on the same level as us. Faced with an increasingly empowered and growing populace, they could react any way. We'll see.
(Yes, I'm trying to get on a list at the NSA. It's an experiment I'm doing. Hopefully I hit enough keywords today.)
[1] Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints? You think governments don't have factory floor managers in their pockets?
We've now got Microsoft (XBox One), Amazon (Echo), Google/Motorola (Moto X) and maybe others who want to place some kind of "always-on" microphone in our houses. They all say the same thing, sure - that the microphone won't be listening to your conversations, that it won't be sending the data to any other servers, etc. Do we believe them? And will they change those policies in the future? Do they even have real contr…
To be fair, the portable devices are not yet monitoring all conversations due to battery life constraints. If it were a wall powered device, I would be very wary of it, but until then it seems highly unlikely it can achieve that behavior and not drain the battery in a noticeable way.
So the product is named "Echo" but you ask it questions by calling it "Alexa"? That's just odd.
edit: "wake word" I guess.
Please have an open API, I can think of a ton of things I would love to use this for.
Hopefully they'll go a step further and develop a whole toolkit to help developers write software with natural language interfaces.