Give us some super strong privacy legislation that I can trust and believe in, and I'd buy this in a flash.
But as it stands today, this is a dangerous and creepy product.
Amazon Echo
681–690 of 746 posts
Re: Amazon Echo
#682Amazon Echo surveillance program. Always on. For only $199.
Re: Amazon Echo
#683Watch 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…
See also: Sales Pitch By Philip K. Dick, 1954: http://www.american-buddha.com/dick.phildickreader.14.htm
Warning: Your company's proxy may flag this up for adult content and nudity. There isn't any, on that page at least. Maybe there's some elsewhere on the site, or maybe it's just overreacting to the URL.
Re: Amazon Echo
#684This all reminds me of "AutoPC" from Clarion in the late 90's[1]. A friend of mine had it in his truck, it truly was amazing at the time -- he could make phone calls, play music, render maps on his display, you name it, all hands free on a tiny little SH-3 processor running windows CE (yes, remember that?!) under his seat. It's sad it really hasn't progressed very far -- Essentially, we've moved on to cloud-hosted au…
Interesting, I didn't know that AutoPC had actually gone anywhere. I was at a WinCE Developer Conference in London where it was presented, and the voice recognition completely failed to work on-stage in a large, hushed auditorium. Given that it was supposed to work in a car, with road noise, it didn't impress anyone (that I could see).
Re: Amazon Echo
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - it can answer questions at the dinner table... that would be my biggest use for it, well that and as a speaker I guess. I really hope that I can swap out "Alexa" for the word "Computer" so I could feel like I'm one step closer to Star Trek
I sincerely wonder about the effect of offloading so much of our "brainwork" to computers. No one remembers phone numbers or tries to navigate without GPS, and increasingly we depend on accesss to information so there's less practice with storage and recall. What brain/neuron plasticity tells us is that our brains literally reallocate unused neurons for other tasks. So, on the one hand, a positive theory might have i…
This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc. The missing step is that these changes are actually optimisations because information really has become easier to access. If we were about to get transported to a pre-internet civilisation, then we would have cause to worry, but since we strongly expect to have access to computers and the internet for the rest of our lives, it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things.
We are getting worse at things that used to be considered 'smart' -- like information retention -- but we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now even than very smart people did in the 20th century.
Re: Amazon Echo
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm guessing that was Talking Tom (the cat). My 2 year old daughter has gotten into similar loops with it several times. Usually though, it's just along the lines of, "No, YOU!"
Re: Amazon Echo
#687What a horrible video and family.
Re: Amazon Echo
#688Watch 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…
Yup. Exactly. Echo's promo video has this strange feeling to it. It's almost as if it's a satire (or horror) disguised as your boilerplate technology product marketing video put out by one of the well-monied firms. I think it's because the acting and dialogue are so unbelievable, but perhaps there really are greater forces at play...
It's a pretty standard tactic of ad agencies for years now to deliberately make TV adverts slightly hallucinatory and weird, to make the viewer jerk out of their coma and lay down some memories. These people are not stupid.
Re: Amazon Echo
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if they plan to capture the unknown commands and run them past human ears to help it learn.
I think Google's voice search already does this (feeding into audio captchas), but obviously there is a smaller crowd from which to source free audio recognition assuming that people who are both sighted and hearing typically prefer visual captchas due to environmental constraints.
Most of the privacy concerns voiced in this threat don't sound like anything new to me, but this one made me take notice. You're suggesting that Google takes random queries from individuals and serves them as captchas to other random people? That sounds like a privacy disaster. Most of the time the queries would be anonymous, but it's certainly not guaranteed there wouldn't be identifying information.
Re: Amazon Echo
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean huge losses, right?
I was attempting sarcasm; I may have failed.
The sarcasm doesn't make sense to me, because that's exactly what Amazon is doing (judgements on what's "bleeding edge" aside). Amazon could easily have massive profits if they weren't reinvesting it all.