It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me.
> People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song.
> I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.
I could just as easily say "People are voluntarily paying for their locations to be tracked for the convenience of being able to get live maps on the go" (ie. cell phones, which also are listening to everything you say unless you disable it)
> It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me.
There's no reason why your house needs to be "tapped" for either of those use cases. All those things could be accomplished without leaving your home network.
There is a massive difference between walking a few steps to turn on a light switch (which is only useful when you are in close proximity) vs having a accurate real-time mapping functionality when on the go.
Similarly, there is a massive difference in the privacy implications of listening to every conversation everyone in your home (including guests) is having vs. having your current location known. Wiretapping laws exist for a reason.
Turning off all the light switches that have been left on in a big house though is a meaningful convenience. I think the privacy point is strong enough without having to trash people's use cases.
No trashing it at all, just contrasting it. I do see the convenience (luxury) of home automation, but when you compare that against accurate mobile mapping, location finding and navigation, the difference in usefulness is orders of magnitude. One can literally save your life.
I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.
Are you arguing that we should just stop creating anything new, since we clearly survived before without it? This comment could literally apply to ANY new thing.
No I'm not, I work on home automation for a living. I am saying the value and added convenience is largely perception and it doesn't. I raised my first kid pre-echo and my second post echo. I think for the most part, raising a kid is easier than we thing, and we are surprised at how well we are doing and attribute that to things around us, much like our old superstitious ancestors.
Yeah, that is kinda my guess, but it doesn't seem to be predictable... sometimes it happens within a few minutes, other times it takes an hour or more.
Heck it helps me sleep -- I'm a light sleeper. I started using the Noisli app every night this past year and my sleep quality improved in noticeable ways.
I also live in a city, so white noise (actually brown noise) masks out tiny noises that interrupt sleep.
Mankind has made countless decisions to trade convenience for some degree of personal freedom. I can live without mobile internet - its just so convenient to have it. Voice control for home appliances is exactly the same.
If I'm home and don't have my phone (or have my hands full, or it's dark, or whatever) I can easily turn lights on or off and without fumbling around for switches or trying to juggle a cat or a child.
I can also control my tv, thermostat, get a news briefing, check my calendar and set reminders.
Yes, it's ultimately a convenience, but so is indoor plumbing and store bought bread.
>Yes, it's ultimately a convenience, but so is indoor plumbing and store bought bread.
I’m sorry, clean water and food are not conviniences. They are among the most basics of human needs. That’s the kind of thing that scares me. That someone would make such a comparison with a straight face.
This is the kind of argument that seems really common and I find very annoying. So 'indoor plumbing' is obviously used to provide us with clean water, but the convenience aspect is the indoor part - you can have clean water from an outdoor communal well, instead. Similarly 'store bought bread' is food, but so is home made bread. I just cannot work out if the commenter was being deliberately obtuse or really misunderstood?
> you can have clean water from an outdoor communal well, instead
Have you ever considered that this is not the case in most of the world? Resources are far from evenly distributed.
It is not by chance that the availability of indoor plumbing correlates to increase in life expectancy. It's nice that I can just open the tap and clean water comes out, but it's also a lot more sanitary than people carrying and storing buckets around.
>I just cannot work out if the commenter was being deliberately obtuse or really misunderstood?
Same here. Comparing the savings of a few steps towards a light switch to clean water and cheap food is intellectual dishonesty at best and severe ignorance at worse.
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.
> Change my earlier examples to remote controls for your TV if you prefer.
My disagreement with you is precisely because you consider them equally interchangeable.
To me, putting those two on the same level is actually offensive.
If data on the increased life expectancy isn’t persuasive enough, I suggest you speak with someone with no access to basic sanitation. Ask them what they think of this comparison.
Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices.
I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.
Yes to the former, pretty much for the latter - the "training" I recall was less than a minute long and consisted of repeating one or two example sentences, hardly anything that would be an adoption impediment to devices like an Echo. The resulting voice recognition worked, in my experience, better than that on modern Android phones.
I'm pretty skeptical of this. Apple has a pretty good commitment to privacy, one that is costing them on the AI front, and as far as I can tell they still upload Siri audio to the cloud for processing. If this was easy to do 10 years ago, I think Apple would at least offer as an option.
Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform.
But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)
That's not why people I know say Siri sucks: for us it's because it can't look up as much info as Amazon or Google. It understands the query, it just can't do as much with it.
Because it makes the voice recognition vastly better. Have you ever noticed that Google can get words correct in navigational searches, even if it only sounds like the name?
We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.
Nobody is going to disagree that it's useful and hard to live without. That's why the big 3 or so tech companies know you'll sell your soul to have it. And yes,I and you should disable location services on your phone when not needed.
Does controlling your home need sending data to an external server thought? Has no one come up with a competing product where all the processing is done in the machine itself?
Nevermind that we are already in a world where you can play any song you like from the wireless computer you carry in your pocket. That's not convenient enough.
OK, but you used the word “tapped.” A smart speaker isn’t supposed to be tapping you any more than a phone is. In both cases, they have to be doing something more than they’re supposed to.
I disagree. To be listening at all times is the very definition of a tap, don’t you think?
And people know this. It’s not like they are being misled. It’s a conscious exchange of privacy for convinence. It’s just that, in my mind, you are getting very little for what you’re giving.
In my mind, you’re giving almost nothing if you already have a cell phone.
I made a different choice, but I totally understand why someone would choose not to have a phone or smart speaker due to privacy concerns. What I don’t get is someone who has a phone but sees smart speakers as crazy.
- You are pretty certain that your phone is listening at all times, even though it's set not to.
- You see no difference between a product that's advertised manly as a listening device and one that also has such a feature, that can theoretically be turned off, and is very useful otherwise.
I don’t think my phone is listening, other than the wake word. Same deal with my smart speakers. I think either one could, if hacked or just updated by the manufacturer with nefarious intent.
I see no difference, privacy-wise, between the two. I don’t care how they’re advertised, I care what they’re capable of.
What’s so bad about having a small processor run a recognition routine on all incoming audio, discarding everything that doesn’t match, and activating the device if it does? Are you just worried about accidental activation?
>What’s so bad about having a small processor run a recognition routine on all incoming audio, discarding everything that doesn’t match, and activating the device if it does?
If that was the case, nothing. But we have enough evidence to believe it's not. While having the device listen, even though it's been explicitly configured not to, is a bit more of a stretch.
>Are you just worried about accidental activation?
That could be an inconvenience too, but I'm more concerned with malicious intent.
What evidence do we have? I’m about 99.9% sure that this story is just accidental activation and bad reporting.
If you’re concerned with malicious intent then I really don’t understand the difference. If the device maker is trustworthy then you’re fine either way. If they’re malicious then you’re screwed either way. A setting for “please don’t listen” isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference if they’re malicious. M
Trust is proportional to access. I don’t trust any third party with an always-on microphone in my house, especially one that’s networked. Malice aside, I don’t trust their competence.
That’s fair, but again, a smartphone fits that description too and nobody is talking about how you’d have to be crazy to let one in your house.
It seems to me that smartphones are significantly worse. You can unplug your smart speaker or kick it off your WiFi and be confident that it can no longer hear you. Smartphones have batteries and cellular data connections. Also they’re usually with you at all times, even when you’re away from home.
That’s fair, but again, a smartphone fits that description too and nobody is talking about how you’d have to be crazy to let one in your house.
A lot of people talk about it, they’re just laughed or shouted down. There’s also the argument that mobile phones undoubtedly offer a number of incredibly useful tools, not the least of which is a primary phone line. I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue for commensurate utility from Alexa or similar products.
Can you? I'm not a tinfoil hat, but the echo is only listening when you address it. It also has a physical mic kill switch, but you don't really know that either mic is not live at any time.
My guess is they mostly do work that way but bugs and vulnerabilities don't seem like a stretch. (As is to be expected with all software)
I doubt it. Recording audio is pretty cheap. Lots of smartphones can now do continuous “wake word” listening just like smart speakers while on battery power.
"Pretty cheap" is still likely an order of magnitude or more than actual standby, and using a small ring buffer to identify a pre-established wake word is similarly going to be cheap compared to actually streaming audio to disk.
If you actually care, this would be pretty trivial to verify using an oscilloscope to observe the energy draw from the battery while different things are said around your device.
I’ve verified it accidentally by using an intelligent alarm with my phone unplugged. The battery drain for eight hours (which includes analysis that would be unnecessary for just recording) was a few percent.
It’s not “whataboutism” to point out that (almost all of) the people who can’t conprehend why anyone would ever have one of these devices have, in fact, already had one for years.
There's a big difference between a device that occasionally listens and can easily be powered off or muffled and a device that is actively listening at all times and can easily "accidentally" capture your conversations.
I like the idea, but wonder if the same features are possible on a stand alone tool. For example, the device does the NLP there on the premise. It exposes a plugin API for apps. The app gets the text translation by registering a callback URI. Then it can do want ever it wants with that. Expose a streaming receiver api for music. Essential get rid of the middle man service.
Possible? Yes. On a Pi? .. Maybe? Probably not with current power I'd guess. Allot goes into the voice training and equivalent operations. There are a few OSS alternatives to build something similar; I don't think anything has a similar power yet though.
There's Mycroft too: https://mycroft.ai/
We have a lot of alternatives but they are unable to get the sort of marketing and hence the attention mainstream devices like Alexa and Google Home do
In fairness ( I'm Mycroft's CEO ) our product isn't on par with Assistant or Alexa....yet. We've had to do a ton of work around wakeword detection, natural language understanding, device management, skills management, user management, credential management and speech synthesis BEFORE we've had a chance to work on the user experience.
That said....we are on track to have a high quality experience when we go to production in Feb 2019 ( Release 19.02 ). As an open source community we'd welcome any help folks have to offer. Contributors don't even need to know how to code, all they need to be able to do is listen to sound samples at https://home.mycroft.ai and tag them as "Hey, Mycroft" or not "Hey, Mycroft"
Thanks to everyone who is helping make Mycroft a reality!
Sure. Have a look at Snips [0], Mycroft [1], Jasper [2] or Adrian [3] which are all open source home assistant devices with voice activation, although some do use Googles NLP cloud APIs for speech processing. Snips seems the most interesting, but looks terrible - a bare PCB on your wall? Really?
I agree completely. Being able to say things out loud and have things happen is cool I guess. However, that doesn't mean I want to give all my data away and it to be stored in some black box on the Internet. I want control of my data.
Actually, yes.
But I am not in a formal relationship, so I can imagine this to be harder to arrange when you live together on a regular schedule.
But I would certainly try to do this in this situation as well.
It is not only privacy btw. it is also just nice to have both persons here in the now and not half distracted because the Smartphone just got new messages. Could be important... but usually never is important enough, to destroy the moment.
So when I go to sleep, alone or not, the mobile is off (without battery) or away. Unless there might be a emergency and I need to be avaiable, but those situations are rare.
I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.