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Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

kiro7.com

671–680 of 734 posts

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's just great. How am I supposed to talk about my cocaine poodle now

I mean, that's an ambiguous term to begin with, and you'd confuse even humans with it. Like, are you referring to a sculpture made of cocaine in the image of a poodle, or are you talking about a poodle train in the ways of a St. Bernard rescue dog, capable of relaying quantities of said substance, or perhaps something else entirely?

I was referring to the poodle I snort my cocaine off the back of. You guys are crazy.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#672

I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the coordinates to a central server. That server makes decisions on if lights should be on or if A/C should be running in that room. But I would never buy this system. I would have to make it myself. I am hopeful that open source software and hardware can produce…

You can literally make it on Arduino or Raspberry Pi for like 100$ and self host it in your LAN in Docker with no Internet access.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that once she knows _that_, it shouldn't be too hard for her to understand when she's not being referred to.

But will she like it, and what will she do about it?

Best not mess with someone who knows where you live and has your credit card. If she's in a good mood, you might be hit with just a pizza prank. Hope she doesn't realize she can swat you without moving a finger.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#674

Amazon's response, from Ars' article: > Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted backgro…

I want some YouTube tech channel to test this out and see if this story by Amazon is bullshit or not. Have a private-sounding conversation and intersperse it with a sudden nonchalant, 'hey, alexa visited me today and...' and then keep talking and then 'I really want to send a message to these students, you know and...' and so on and so forth.

I think it's decently plausible if your Alexa hears you, but you don't hear your Alexa. So you continue on your conversation, and you say enough to keep progressing the flow.

I would assume any failed speech recognition attpempts are recorded so Amazon can have a human look at and classify them, but at the very least they probably keep logs, so they should have this information when debugging. Maybe we'll get a more detailed postmortem later.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#675
post #327
post #297

I am oversimplifying here but: * install device that is designed to listen to speech in the house * the device is connected to internet * the device is capable of contacting other internet peers/services/hosts * the device knows a bit about its owner's internet presence such as contacts * the device is equipped with simple conversational user interface based on fuzzy human speech-command detection These basically bou…

I remember the first voice command stuff on google. Buddy of mine was trying it out and I couldn't help myself but shout: "NEW TEXT MESSAGE TO JENNY! FUCK YOU! SEND!" Fortunately the phone was too slow to take it all (even if it had Jenny would have found it amusing, she was a cube or two away). But yeah first thing I thought of was that if it's listening how easy is it for it to mistake intent or someone else or etc…

I always think if I ever present somewhere again, I'm tempted to start off by asking people to put their phones into silent mode... wait a moment, then "OK Google, Siri show me dick picks"

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#676
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the first voice command stuff on google. Buddy of mine was trying it out and I couldn't help myself but shout: "NEW TEXT MESSAGE TO JENNY! FUCK YOU! SEND!" Fortunately the phone was too slow to take it all (even if it had Jenny would have found it amusing, she was a cube or two away). But yeah first thing I thought of was that if it's listening how easy is it for it to mistake intent or someone else or etc…

I always think if I ever present somewhere again, I'm tempted to start off by asking people to put their phones into silent mode... wait a moment, then "OK Google, Siri show me dick picks"

Hey Siri is keyed to a specific persons voice. Is the google equivalent not?

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that they were not comparing anything to clean water or cheap food . They were comparing something to water that doesn't need to be moved inside manually and bread that doesn't have to be made at home. Neither of which is needed to live. Both of which are conveniences.

It's not though, please reread the comment above. Water brought and stored in buckets from an outdoor communal well would not be nearly as clean or as plentiful. There's a reason we have indoor plumbing and convenience is just one of them. And I can't believe I have to explain this here.

You seem to be intentionally missing the point. Change my earlier examples to remote controls for your TV if you prefer.

Convenience does, absolutely, have strong value and can be meaningful improvement to one's life. Generalized voice control is a major and meaningful convenience - even if it's currently early and might have some problems - because it drastically changes how we can interact with our environments.

Sure, we can short sell the case as "not needing to walk to a light switch", but even then if it's dark, my arms are full, and the path to the switch is littered with children's toys then that's a meaningful improvement to be able to say "Hey google, turn on the living room light".

Consider cases of people with severe MS or who otherwise can't easily walk. Sure, they could hook up a remote control and keep it near them, or get one of those stupid clapper things, but even then that only works for the lights.

A generalized voice assistant gives me control over my house, from anywhere my voice can be heard, and not only executes my actions, but can give me realtime feedback and data. Best of all, this requires no special skills on my part, just a willingness to talk to the damned thing loudly and clearly with simple words.

Can it act as a wire tap? Of course it can. My store bought bread can also be contaminated (right now in my area there is a huge contamination issue with eggs and lettuce), my indoor plumbing can burst and flood my house, so on. It's a new technology, it has kinks and flaws, and we're currently in the early adopter curve of it moving towards the initial disappointment trend.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#678
post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a pretty big stretch...

I mean, if this was a one in a million chance of happening, and there have been billions of conversations happening near devices like these, I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. If you have an echo and it kicks on unexpectedly, you can go to the app to see what it thought you said, along with a recording of you saying it. I've had "alright, uhh..." trigger it. and on the grainy bad across the room recording…

Given the numbers it has almost certainly happened at least hundreds of times and probably thousands of times. But the remaining sequence of events - the receiver notifies the sender, and a media outlet picks it up, and amazon comments seems to have only happened once so far.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think if I ever present somewhere again, I'm tempted to start off by asking people to put their phones into silent mode... wait a moment, then "OK Google, Siri show me dick picks"

Hey Siri is keyed to a specific persons voice. Is the google equivalent not?

It is. OK Google won't unlock a locked phone unless the voice matches, and you specifically enable the feature that allows it to unlock the screen. Once the screen is unlocked however, only certain functions that access your account will need to match your voice (if you spent the time to get Google to recognize your voice.) Performing web or photo searches wouldn't require you to match the voice if the phone was otherwise unlocked.

Asking someone to silence their phone might just be an attempt to get them to unlock their phone before issuing the offending command.

Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

#680
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the first voice command stuff on google. Buddy of mine was trying it out and I couldn't help myself but shout: "NEW TEXT MESSAGE TO JENNY! FUCK YOU! SEND!" Fortunately the phone was too slow to take it all (even if it had Jenny would have found it amusing, she was a cube or two away). But yeah first thing I thought of was that if it's listening how easy is it for it to mistake intent or someone else or etc…

> As it is I hate how I can't talk ABOUT "ok google" around my phone... because it always goes off. On several tech podcasts I listen to ( http://atp.fm , https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/ ) they use fillers like "Yo, dingus!" to talk about alexa/hey siri/ok google

Another convention seems to be 'Alexo' when you want to talk about Alexa but not to Alexa.
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