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You say that, but I think young people are concerned with privacy: see snapchat, etc
Snapchat is in no way private.
- it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good.
- it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would be much more socially pleasant.
- it can stream music without the hassle of bluetooth. Bluetooth streaming becomes less convenient when you don't know which of the many computers, phones or tablets were used to start the music, or where it is...
- my three year old can probably figure out how to use it
Thought I'd throw those out there, and start a "positive" thread. This discussion is overwhelmingly negative. Lots of good points being made in the negative comments, but there are some nice positives, too.
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I noticed that your profile mentioned "recording engineer" so maybe some concrete numbers related to digital audio technology will put boundaries on plausible scenarios. We assume either of 2 engineering designs: (#1) the trigger word "Alexa" is detected within an embedded chip . The DSP (digital signal processing) intelligence for analyzing sound waveforms is inside the device. Therefore, the words spoken after "Ale…
I'm glad we're now discussing our assumptions about what Echo can/does do. You present a scenario that I certainly did not imply, namely that Echo must be performing voice recognition in the cloud. Also, you make it out as though that is the conceivable alternative possible to on-chip voice recognition, from a privacy point of view. Let me present another scenario to you - Echo keeps "listening" to all our conversati…
Yes, I went back and added scenario #3... apparently at the same time you typed your reply. I think my scenario #3 is similar in spirit to what you're warning people about.
>P.S. My profile says I'm a "recovering" engineer, not a "recording" one :)
I have several browser tabs on music recording and I definitely had a dyslexic moment there.
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No, Siri only takes commands when you activate it. There's an "always listening" feature, but this is off by default and only works when you are plugged into external power.
How do you know that it's actually off?
I take your meaning, in the sense that there's no inherent reason to trust one but not the other; but I think that it's fair to say that there's a big difference between:
Hey, wouldn't it be handy for our users if we started storing and pre-processing audio *before* hearing 'Alexa', so that we're ready to respond instantly? Let's quietly take down the text that says that we don't do that.
Hey, wouldn't it be a good idea if we ignored our users' explicit election to turn off a feature?
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If you have a smartphone with Siri or the equiv app on it (Android, Windows) your device is already 'always listening.' I fail to see the difference. People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy. Hilarious.
> People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy. i think people who are worried about privacy are not the people who are broadcasting their entire lives on social networks
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I didn't call anyone an idiot. I said the general HN population is treated like idiots because there's always "that guy" who feels the need to sound the alarm every time something gets sent to Google/Apple/Amazon. I got it the first 10 times it was discussed. I've been warned.
> I didn't call anyone an idiot. I know; sorry I didn't write more clearly. I meant that them calling you "idiot" and you calling them "paranoid" is roughly equivalent.
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Wouldn't it be fairly simple to just monitor network connections to see how often it's sending data to Amazon's servers? Granted - then of course you can have the argument that it's always recording, and then only sending data at the opportune time so that it's a little bit more hidden. And to that - I'd just say you can keep track of how much data should be being sent for the average command.
i would much rather have a device that i can actually control and trust instead of having to spy on a device that's most likely spying on me in ways i might not like.
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…
>Is this much better than just having a really good smartphone with voice recognition that's connected to speakers in the house? It doesn't look like it. Maybe it has a better microphone? In any case, this seems like a function that could be just as easily accomplished by a smartphone. (Maybe this is a wasted Fire-phone opportunity?)
I already have a smart phone with Google Now, and I have a Sonos, but I'd still consider getting this to solve this common use case in our household:
Every morning my wife or daughter asks what the weather is going to be like. My wife could ask Siri, but she doesn't always have her iPhone at hand. I always have my phone, so I ask Google Now. I think it would be fun to have an Echo in the kitchen so my wife or daughter could just ask and get an answer. And it goes way beyond that. My daughter loves taking my phone and asking Google Now silly questions. It is high entertainment for her. Echo would be a device that she could interact with without having to co-opt my (or my wife's) phone.
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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…
It is not "pathetic baseless fear mongering" when we already have evidence that governments around the world are willing to overstep their bounds in terms of monitoring their own people. > In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. In order for it to hear the key word 'Alexa', it has to be always listening. They're just saying that they promise not to process…
Why I might buy an Echo: - it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good. - it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would…