I hate the ad because fundamentally it is created on gender stereotypes. The boy wants to listen to rock music and the girl to dance numbers. The woman is cooking and wants to know tablespoon to teaspoon conversion. The man is waking up to go to work and wants to listen to the news. Argh! We are not in the Mad Men era!!
Amazon Echo
661–670 of 746 posts
Re: Amazon Echo
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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 keep out of your house. > Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone? Neither the first nor the last of those is necessarily always on or Internet connected. (For example, I…
Following that logic, you CAN turn off the echo, it's got what looks like mute and power buttons right on top.
It has a mic mute button, but not a power switch.
Re: Amazon Echo
#663I'm surprised by the privacy backlash in this thread! I understand why this product is so scary for someone who is concerned about privacy, but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use? You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) w…
I am not really worried about privacy, but this smacks of false equivalency. > You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will. People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information t…
>This device is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data.
Not necessarily true, a catch phrase programmed on-board is used to activate the device. If the device was constantly transmitting voice data to Amazon I would have to guess that the leakage of data would be picked up and could be exposed. I still don't think the smart phone analogy is dissimilar, if not worse than the Echo in terms of the privacy implications. What if a catch phrase was programmed into your phone (for instance a list of words a 'terrorist' might use), and it only sent recorded/geo/image/contact information for a short time after it was used? I don't think that would be an easy privacy compromise to spot if you didn't know the catch phrase. Not to mention that many people's smartphones are constantly transmitting location data to Google, without complaint.
Re: Amazon Echo
#664Well it looks like Amazon just did the market research for anyone that's wanted to make an open source version of this. Like these guys have: http://jasperproject.github.io/ I've had this idea sitting in the back of my brain for years, worked up some simple prototypes (just using computer's mic), the technology is already there and surprisingly simple (made simple for the layman by brilliant people)...
I've been working on a personal webapp using cmusphinx for trigger-word detection, google for the rest of the voice recognition, wit.ai for the NLP, and google again for the voice output. Works pretty well, but would probably give most of the privacy-wary folks here a heart attack. Planning on hooking it up to a monitor mounted in a picture frame on our wall.
That sounds pretty awesome -- yeah, once you include some 3rd party that isn't locally hosted, privacy is pretty much out the window....
But, privacy might be irreversibly going the way of dinosaurs in the first place...
Re: Amazon Echo
#665The device is definitely not constantly listening and uploading to the cloud (or at least they certainly do not intend it to). This keyword recognition thing everyone is doing is to make interaction more intentional, reduce misrecognition, bandwidth consumption, and processing costs. Keyword recognition is done locally on the device at minimal processing cost. Compared to actually recognizing your speech, it's trivia…
It's a 7 mic array. It would be interesting to see the calculations on how much data they expect flowing to the cloud per day per device.
Re: Amazon Echo
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making my point for me. The system largely ignores a large majority of the people, who therefore don't care much about this issue to feel deterred from buying the relevant technology. Hence the enormous popularity of smartphones with GPS functionality and so forth: never getting lost >> government tracking everywhere you go, for most people.
The system isn't designed to watch everyone. It's designed to watch anyone .
The technical apparatus is designed to watch everyone.
The legal apparatus is designed to watch anyone.
Re: Amazon Echo
#667Google is in real trouble if it really works as advertised.
Re: Amazon Echo
#668Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie. A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father. The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her? Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa an…
This reminded me of one of my fav film Blinky(Bad robot)...
Re: Amazon Echo
#669I would like to know if the question answering system is all in house tech or if Amazon is using 3rd party services like Watson.
Re: Amazon Echo
#670Earlier 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.
As a person, I struggle with 3 year old voices... I think its just that they are still learning how to properly form words.
When one of my daughters was 3 someone handed an iphone with one of those apps with an animal that repeats things back. She said something with the word "color" in it, but it came out "cala."
It repeated it back (incorrectly) and then she got stuck in a loop of saying "not cala, cala!" and it repeating it back, getting more frustrated each time.