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Continuous low-power music recognition

research.google.com

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Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#21

Post by taneq »

Harvey-Specter wrote: post #18
taneq wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they say: > Since everything runs locally on the device without sending either audio or fingerprints to a server, the privacy of the user is respected and the whole system can run in airplane mode. This is far more respectful of user privacy than we usually see from Google. I, for one, am impressed.

What does this have to do with the comment you replied to?

A complaint about marketing ("get us to buy more"), on an article about always-on audio processing in a phone, implies a concern about privacy-invading user tracking. I was pointing out that (on the face of it, at least) this doesn't seem to do that.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#22

Post by jclardy »

bhouston wrote: post #2

Is this why Shazam sold? Its basic functionality was going to be built into Andriod/Google Assistant?

It already is available on both the iPhone and Android through Siri/Google Assistant. Just ask them "What song is this?" This just seems to be an extension of it so you don't need to ask, the phone can just display the album info passively when you pick up the phone. Of course Apple's integration is already using Shazam for the actual identification, but you don't need the app installed.

Hard to compete with that if you aren't integrated at an OS level.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#23

Post by ufmace »

I have the Nexus 2 with this feature, and it works remarkably well. No noticeable power drain, and it identifies a lot of songs that I never would have thought to ask about, like TV show intros and such. It's handy that if I ever wonder what a song that's playing is, I can pull out my phone and it's usually already there instead of having to unlock it, ask it what's playing, and wait a bit, if the internet is even working there. Pretty cool that they can pull this off with no network communication.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#24

Post by yathern »

CapacitorSet wrote: post #20
xr4ti wrote: post #17

> Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to be much less respectful of my privacy than an app that only listens to the ambient sound around me when I explicitly give my consent (by opening/activating the app).

Of course their baseline for privacy is not "leaks as little user data as possible", but "does everything on the cloud". Hence it seems to respect user privacy from their point of view. Not that they have a reasonable point of view, of course.

While I agree with you that "cloud-private" is a new baseline that may not be a great thing - that's a strange point to make, given the text explicitly calls out that it's not doing anything on the cloud. It's all on-device.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#25

Post by keytarsolo »

xr4ti wrote: post #17

> Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to be much less respectful of my privacy than an app that only listens to the ambient sound around me when I explicitly give my consent (by opening/activating the app).

This option has to be explicitly turned on. It's off by default (at least it was on my German Pixel 2).

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#26

Post by svantana »

Using neural nets for this purpose makes it likely to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Fairly harmless in this use case, but if a similar system would be used for ContentID on YouTube, that could be exploited to subvert it (i.e. spam it with false positives and contest the verdicts en masse).

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#27

Post by spdustin »

Seems to me that it’s another part of a fingerprint for a user that can locate them, and possibly place you with others in the vicinity who have ID’d the same audio. Retail outlets have playlists that could be ID’d, possibly with enough granularity to indicate your path through a shopping mall or your dwell time in a particular department.

I know the recognition is done on-device for some percentage of tracks, but it’s been unclear to me what happens to the running tally of times/locations/tracks identified afterward.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#29

Post by Ajedi32 »

xr4ti wrote: post #17

> Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to be much less respectful of my privacy than an app that only listens to the ambient sound around me when I explicitly give my consent (by opening/activating the app).

What's your actual privacy concern?

If the whole process happens entirely on-device, then this reveals absolutely no information of any kind to anyone, correct?

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#30

Post by pavel_lishin »

keytarsolo wrote: post #25
xr4ti wrote: post #17

> Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to be much less respectful of my privacy than an app that only listens to the ambient sound around me when I explicitly give my consent (by opening/activating the app).

This option has to be explicitly turned on. It's off by default (at least it was on my German Pixel 2).

It was enabled on my phone - which I discovered at the dentist's office. Now, it's possible that I idly clicked "ok" while setting up my Pixel 2 - it's not out of the realm of possibility - but I'm not very likely to turn that on at all.

Germany has much more stringent privacy regulations than the US does - maybe that's the difference.

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