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Amazon Echo

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Re: Amazon Echo

#181

Post by kevinbowman »

lbearl wrote: post #150
untog wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!" In this case it wasn't even the NSA I was thinking about, rather Amazon themselves. "Hey, I'm heading to the grocery store, do you need anything?" "Yeah, get some milk?" Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term. You don't know that. This is not going t…

Its not really a black box, you still conceivably own the network it is running on. Last I checked Wireshark was pretty good at capturing network traffic. Even if the connection is encrypted, if the device isn't sending oodles of data to Amazon when you are chatting chances are good it isn't send "every word" to them. Granted, being able to audit this directly ourselves instead of observing it in other ways would be…

It's possible that the device will transcribe and record the text of everything, and then only send it upstream in batches along with the consumer-useful chatter. Over a TLS link, that would look quite innocuous.

Re: Amazon Echo

#182

Post by melling »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

> 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.

Hey, you're that guy!

Re: Amazon Echo

#183

Post by nyxtom »

I don't understand why we don't have more open source solutions for things like this. It's glorified voice search. Most of these Q-A systems are hand built to answer types of questions, with feedback loops for usage and ways to improve the system. I'm growing a little tired of these cloud-centric solutions that ultimately have their own company's interests at heart for ad-retargeting.

Re: Amazon Echo

#184

Post by dandroid1 »

asafira wrote: post #159

While most of the posts are, and probably should be, concerned with the privacy implications of this device if/when it reaches peoples' homes, I also wonder the plain-old "will this flop?" Adding voice recognition to things isn't a new idea, and the threshold for when it's "good enough" for the general populace for any use case is pretty poorly understood and/or quantified. Is this a use case people would be interest…

Worst case, it's a music streaming speaker that doesn't require you to stream via bluetooth. I wonder how the audio stacks up against something like the Bose SoundLink.

Re: Amazon Echo

#185

Post by acrefoot »

hashtree wrote: post #33
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

> 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.

I know for a fact that the wake word processing is done locally on the device. You could even check its network traffic to see that this is the case.

I'm not sure what protections you would have against a secret court order making the device always listen (via an OTA update) for select individuals, but you can at least check that they don't have such monitoring enabled for most devices.

Re: Amazon Echo

#186

Post by jasonlotito »

hashtree wrote: post #33
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

> 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.

> if and only if, the "wake word" processing is done locally

That's what it's doing.

Re: Amazon Echo

#188

Post by gtirloni »

Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music

I usually have trouble with the Kinect 2's microphone while I'm playing music or watching TV. It's nice that Amazon is concerned about this. Does anyone know how many microphones the Kinect has?

Re: Amazon Echo

#189

Post by jjwiseman »

kolev wrote: post #134
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

> 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.

Well, until Amazon starts understanding Bulgarian (the language we speak at home), I'll be fine. Just imagine an Amazon Prime members' freebie next year: unlimited recording of everything you've ever said at home for free and accessible on the web or via our companion app.

Nuance can recognize Bulgarian: http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-serv...

Re: Amazon Echo

#190

Post by Dofuss »

We're proud to announce "Echo," developed by Amazon, and exploited by the NSA.

We're proud to announce "Echo," a Siri for your home.

lol

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