Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

Post by peacefulhat » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #104

choeger wrote: post #97

I might sound like a grumpy old granddad to some of you (and I am not even that old), but did you really think that a huge company would offer to put microphones into your living room for your advantage? They are going to benefit from this and you are going to pay for it. How? For instance with dynamic pricing. Your loved ones tell you how much they want that vacation on that Greek island? Good luck finding a cheap f…

Any of those things would be such massive trust violations that the fallout would almost certainly sink the product and badly tarnish the company. That's not saying a company wouldn't be stupid enough to try it, but it's very clearly a bad business decision - so logically they wouldn't do it.

Post by marricks » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #173

marricks wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you told someone 2008 that the fun scrappy startup offering Gmail would be reading your emails for ads* (see reply to this!) until 2017 and only stopped when another tech company had a massive leak of personal information which helped sway a presidential election* people would call you absolutely mad. Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started…

> If you told someone 2008 that the fun scrappy startup offering Gmail would be reading your emails Google explicitly stated their would read your emails to show ads next to them at launch. This was a surprise to nobody. > and only stopped It never stopped reading mail. How do you think searching your inbox or filtering spam work? In light of this, the rest of your post is pure conspiracy theory nonsense. Google was…

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

croutonwagon wrote: post #91

harha wrote: post #86

I had one of these when I worked for Google, I didn’t quite trust it though, so I had it in the bathroom to limit what my employer could listen to. Imagine discussing a product idea at home with friends, then having that stolen by an engineer at one of these companies (who figured out how to find the interesting conversations) for a promotion or new position. On a larger scale these might get hooked up with some adve…

I just dont have them in the house. Every now and then i get called paranoid. And sure, my phone can function the same (though i specifically have siri disabled on our iphones) Its just a cost benefit. I can get off the couch and flip a switch or use a remote to turn on a song. I really dont need speach recognition for those functions.

Post by disillusioned » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #175

TeMPOraL wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask average person - hell, average techie - about it, and I'm pretty certain you'll discover they don't know what you're talking about. They really weren't up front about it, they might have just not been hiding it very hard. Part of the solution to the tech vs. privacy problems could be forcing companies to be actually up front about their business models. After all, it's not wrong for an individual to give up their…

It was obvious. The ads were displayed right next to the messages and we're relevant to the messages being shown. At launch, they prominently described how this worked on the sign up page. https://web.archive.org/web/20040410020148/http://gmail.goog... To my mind, the biggest privacy violator that doesn't admit it's privacy violations right now is Apple. Even as a non-Apple user, I have my WiFi location slurped up by…

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #120

nitrogen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compressed audio at speech quality uses miniscule amounts of storage, especially with modern codecs like Opus.

You addressed storage but skipped the CPU portion: Yes, Opus can create good quality audio with low storage requirements, but it cannot do so without a high CPU cost.