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If you bug your own home and consent to third-party, opaque management of the surveillance, things like this will happen[1]. I expect worse to come. [1] Am not saying anyone deserves this, or that AZON is either evil or beneficent, or anything else other than precisely what was stated.
Amazon's ticker is AMZN.
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I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.
Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when ther…
I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.
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I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.
Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when ther…
People who use these "microphones" are idiots. They are right on up there with the people that give away their DNA to web companies.
I have an Echo on my kitchen counter. I know there's a small chance that it may be hacked or have a bug or be deliberately modified to surreptitiously record from my kitchen audio that ends up on some Amazon server somewhere, or in the hands of law enforcement, or the NSA, or hackers, or whatever.
I just don't really care. I like the convenience of the device, there's a lot of scrutiny on the devices and the companies that make them, discouraging deliberate misuse, and I don't really say anything interesting or worth hiding. And if someone is going to deliberately target me, my life is jammed with devices that are probably a much bigger risk surface area.
I would never say anyone else should get one if they feel the privacy risks outweigh the benefits, but I'm not personally concerned.
However, I may be wrong. So change my view: why should I care or be worried?
EDIT: Just realized the substantial difference is that Google and Amazon own all of these things. They don't control all makes and models of phones.
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It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me. > People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this wo…
I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.
We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.
Pays Amazon for a listening device and installs in home...gets upset when it listens.
That seems overly simplistic to me. It's like saying that someone buys a car that's powered by an explosive liquid, and then complains when all the gas in the tank explodes at the same time.
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That pocket computer also has all the same potential threats to privacy. Somehow nobody cares about them, though.
> That pocket computer also has all the same potential threats to privacy. Somehow nobody cares about them, though. This is just whataboutism. We can complain about Amazon in a thread about Amazon without having to tackle a whole different issue.
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I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.
How did we do it before? I can't even imagine. /s
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