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Amazon Echo

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Re: Amazon Echo

#351

Post by IgorPartola »

lsaferite wrote: post #327
IgorPartola wrote: post #320

I recently bought into the Sonos ecosystem. While it is pretty limited in some ways (I can't just stream stuff playing on my phone to the Sonos speakers, for example if I am playing a random YouTube video), it has one really good thing going for it: it can sync playback between an arbitrary number of speakers. This is my new standard for this type of thing: speakers that cannot do this are inferior to Sonos. In that…

I was just covering the sync thing with the guys in my office. In any large building you'll need multiple units to provide good coverage. They need to ensure these work in that context as well.

And it's incredibly hard to do without running wires. Just to cover the first floor of my house, I need 4-6 speakers. I am not willing to commit to wires for this, which is where Sonos shines.

Re: Amazon Echo

#352

Post by discipline »

readerrrr wrote: post #336
freehunter wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are trading your so far rarely touched privacy Prove it. Seriously, don't speculate like this until it's proven one way or the other. Prove that it violates my privacy and then we will talk.

You must be joking. Why don't you "prove" that all the metadata is not used for commercial purposes, and that metadata isn't available to government agencies.

No, you must be joking. The burden of proof in an argument has to be borne by the one making the claim. If you claim you saw a UFO, the burden of proof is on you. The burden of proof does not fall on everyone else to prove that what you saw could NOT, in any way, shape, or form, possibly be a UFO.

Re: Amazon Echo

#353

Post by incision »

Privacy questions aside.

What I'd really like to know is whether this thing will have some form of speaker recognition - identifying who is speaking, not just what is being said and further whether the learning functions will make that same distinction.

I have a family, including a small child. That's at least three people who would conceivably use this device.

Tech companies and Amazon in particular have been awful about these things. It took forever for Netflix to start accommodating multiple viewer households, the Kindle Fire shipped with no parental controls plus 1-click ordering and Android didn't add multiple user support until 4.2.

Echo needs all these things to be more than an experiment / gimmick.

(I notice this post fell directly to the middle of the page - not the typical behavior. Am I tripping some sort automatic moderation? Using the world 'gimmick' perhaps? Is this how posting 'height' works on popular / heavily commented stories? Just curious.)

Re: Amazon Echo

#354

Post by cmicali »

stronglikedan wrote: post #326
bryanlarsen wrote: post #302

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…

While we're being positive, I absolutely do not think Amazon would be stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot sending all recorded data up to the cloud. I'm certain that within a few hours of release, someone will have a network monitor hooked up. Their findings will be widely known almost immediately, and this thing would be dead in the water if they were sending everything up. They know this already.

This very likely uses network speech recognition, so most things (except for the wake-up word) are being streamed up and recognized in Amazon's data center (Siri, SVoice, etc all do this also)

Re: Amazon Echo

#355

Post by ars »

delecti wrote: post #123
jgrahamc wrote: post #60

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all…

I think that's exactly why they all have trigger words, "Ok Google", "Xbox", "Alexa". Makes it at least a little less likely.

Unless you happen to have a child named Alexa.....

Re: Amazon Echo

#356

Post by freyr »

chatmasta wrote: post #87

This "internet-of-things" trend coincides unfortunately with the "dragnet surveillance" trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society. The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to ke…

Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip

That's irrelevant. That's merely one of the possibly ways that triggers transmission, but not necessarily the only way. Do we know that remote triggering over the network (perhaps implemented for testing) isn't possible?

Re: Amazon Echo

#357

Post by mahyarm »

chatmasta wrote: post #87

This "internet-of-things" trend coincides unfortunately with the "dragnet surveillance" trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society. The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to ke…

I don't how much different the echo is compared to a cell phone microphone, which has been around for quite a while, have been designed for hands free conversations and have had modes to activate the microphone when not in a call for quite a while.

The echo has a better mic and is guaranteed to not be in a pocket, but that isn't the multiple order of magnitude difference that the cell phone has brought to dragnet surveillance.

Re: Amazon Echo

#358

Post by duskwuff »

LockeWatts wrote: post #339
jameshart wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your three year old probably can't use it. Current voice recognition - Siri, kinect, et al - all seem to struggle with child voices. Maybe something they've expressly worked on for this 'home assistant' scenario, but I don't hold out much hope. It's a general pattern that early releases of human-interaction tech tend to optimize for 50th percentile western males.

Why wouldn't they? If they're being released in the west, they're optimizing for their largest target demographic.

Children generally don't enunciate as clearly as adults. Their speech is more difficult for a computer (or a human who doesn't know the language well!) to understand.

Re: Amazon Echo

#360

Post by phreeza »

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.

How is it different from installing a random program on your computer? That would also have microphone access and could in theory spy on you.
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