All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
I don’t need smart XYZ appliances that connect to the internet. After working a decade in the industry, I’ve seen enough of what these companies do with user data. No thank you.
Also, I don’t speak English at home. So that’s a hedge for now I guess.
> All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Not only could they listen at any time (albeit with lower quality), I put extremely personal information into my phone via the screen keyboard all the time. How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
> The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Let me just be the first to say I absolutely have an issue with smartphones.
(edit: Of course, I could very well count in the 'almost nobody' category, but the same might well be true in general for people concerned about smart devices.)
I also absolutely have an issue with smartphones and privacy.
But I'm also a pragmatist.
In my opinion Apple, while not even approaching being "perfect", are most likely to be the least worst of all practical options. 5 or 10 years back, I would have ranked Google's Pixel phones in 2nd, but not so much these days, if they're still 2nd they're a long long way back from 1st and only second because every other choice is so so bad. I used to buy Samsung phones back in the Galaxy S2 up to Galaxy S6 era, but they did so many bad-for-security things I no longer trust them with any of my data.
I don't trust any of the Chinese brand at all. Although I do have a few super inexpensive Chinese Android tablets that get used on a non internet connected subnet as home automation controllers. Even if they do manage to phone home, the only sensitive data they have is the private subnet wifi password and the always-on VPN endpoint through the router. I like to think (but cannot prove) that Chinese manufacturing hasn't managed to plant working backdoors in every iPhone they build, and that if they have targetted supply chain attacks for individual or small batches of devices that I'm not interesting enough to burn one of those on. I do sometimes wonder whether Jamal Khashoggi thought that too though...
I've "settled" with the level of security I believe my iPhone gives me. Partly because I long ago made peace with the fact that if a nation state security agency even became "interested" in my, I've already lost the game. I've given up trying to protect myself against the NSA or Mossad or the MSS or the FSB, or even "second tier" security agencies like my local ASIS. I do what I can to make it hard for adversaries like organised crime, scammers, script kiddies, and surveillance capitalists, and I'd like to think I've done enough that law enforcement (short of ASIS) probably can't access data on my devices via technical means (while knowing full well they have the capability to ruin my life if I refuse to hand over password and decryption keys).
> How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
Probably because phone manufacturers have historically not done things as bad as Amazon has privacy-wise.
They can technically store, but not always legally, since storage may be in violation of their privacy policy. For example, Apple won't store the audio, unless you opt in [1].
Soft Welsh accents are really good for robots, because they combine the sort of officious, authoritative British English accent with a folksy, approachable quality. Then they wait for you to go to sleep…and with a lilting brogue glancing faintly off the meniscus of your dreams you hear, “Ay, oi, Dave! They’re out, it’s time.” and that’s how the world ends. A Welsh-accent LLM named “Dave” decides sheep husbandry is the maximally productive utility for the Earth and Solar System. Humanity is lost. Dave the AI companion from Swansea and a trillion sheep remain.
A relative’s doctor’s practice just got acquired by one of these private-equity-backed profit-hungry medical chains.
I went with him to an appointment. As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet at the office, he had to sign away his HIPAA rights for them to sell his charts, along with his identity information, to advertisers or any other third parties. I was beside myself.
Wasn’t long afterward before he started seeing insultingly specific (but medically incorrect) prescription drug ads, almost exclusively, on his TV service.
> As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet
As with QR codes in restaurants, reception tablets with NDA boilerplate, or electronic security scanners, declining to use an electronic device can lead to the magical appearance of a manual alternative, where lines of text on paper can be crossed out manually before signing and taking a photo for your records.
This is because the consent (of 99% who will not decline) is only valid if the 1% who choose to decline can actually do so. If everyone is forced and it's literally impossible to decline consent, then none of it is consent, and they may as well omit the text and do whatever they want anyway. The act of asking consent for ridiculous terms is actually quite positive, if one ignores the implied pressure of a silicon wrapping.
For clarity sake, this is what "Do not send voice recordings" used to do [1]:
"Here’s how it works: When you turn on Do Not Send Voice Recordings and say your chosen wake word, an on-device algorithm will process and transcribe your request to Alexa from audio into text. The text is encrypted and sent to Amazon’s secure cloud where we can fulfill your interaction. After processing, the audio of your request is deleted."
So they transcribed the voice and sent the text to the cloud. Surprising that needs to go to allow GenAI to work?
I've always wondered what kinds of things can happen within the specifics of privacy policies nowadays.
Like I think it would be possible to have text/voice/object recognition work on the photos you send in an end-to-end encrypted chat app, described out-of-band and used for ... purposes.
<encrypted data stream>
<"spoken keyword: starbucks">
<"picture: LG washing machine">
<"picture: donald trump">
<"text: prescription xanax">
Alexa with GenAI is a paid (via Prime for now) product, right?
Echo can work offline for control of Zigbee devices connected to Echo (non-Dot) Gen4, which is a Zigbee hub with US firmware. Voice commands such as "Turn Porch Light On" can be processed locally on Echo and executed immediately, without an internet connection, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
If an Alexa customer is using this offline functionality today, with no interest in GenAI or other online features, how can Amazon remove it?
The Stasi or the KGB would have loved to install listening devices into everyone's homes, so they can monitor everyone. And here we are, people are voluntarily doing it. It's like a dream come true, just a few decades too late.
Right? Who honestly didn't think these devices would be used to spy on them and their homes? Even after reports of third party contractors listening to people having sex made headlines people continued to buy and keep them.
Just like some people need to touch a hot stove to learn they need to be careful some people will just refuse to accept anything bad is happening to them until they see it with their own eyes and surveillance capitalism exploits that by keeping the harms so removed from the collection of private data that most people will never accept the connection even after they're told about what's happening.
Anyone have any experience with the offline OSS offerings?
Eager to replace my cheap Echo devices with more expensive privacy friendly options.
Another question: anyone aware of community custom firmware efforts? I know early gen devices had some exploits but it never resulted to much last I checked.
Home assistant is your gateway into this. You can even run it all locally with decent but not outrageous specs or plug into a cloud api. There is even an option to process home control locally and send other queries to the cloud.
I've used Home Assistant Voice (Preview Edition) and ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside Home Assistant 's Voice capabilities - by default there are phrases included, and you can add your own, but you have to be precise - "turn off the lights" and "turn off the lamp" are two separate phrases (or a variable one, which can be expanded by a locally (or not) hosted LLM.
Voice detection is pretty good, especially on the Voice, even from across a room. Not 100% (especially with higher pitched voices), but definitely high and usable. The main downside is the fact that you either need to host a local LLM, which isn't cheap, or predefine all phrases you want.
What has your experience been with Home Assistant voice? I also have one but still use my Alexa’s. I love HA and it runs my house but my initial tests were not great. I tried both OpenAI and HA cloud assistants but I could have spent more time tweaking things and I bet I could have done a lot by writing my own prompt.
I'd really love something that enabled me to use the hardware without Home Assistant. I know it's OSS (basically ESPhome), but I'd like a server I could point my Voice thing to and be able to receive a webhook with the text I just spoke, and have it read the text that my server returns out loud.
I'd implement the actual smarts myself, I just want the STT/TTS interface sorted.
Home Assistant uses the Wyoming protocol to talk to Whisper, Piper, and the various other components of the speech pipeline. Might be something to check out?
It is literally impossible to transcribe voice, especially if you whisper. There's no way to model the language, it's too large - amanzon has many computers. Your computer is like a tortoise, it can't do text-to-speech. There's no way you can get any of this to use the Web, Dav... er, Cal. Trying to do this would be like trying to torch a python with your bare metal hands.
I’m getting more and more tempted to start a startup to sell a small box for a purely local LLM for HomeKit and google assistant control (and home assistant of course). I wonder if the market is strong enough for this. Sure, it won’t be GPT 4 level but it’ll definitely be better than Siri. Maybe YC 2026.
Tech is evolving too quickly; every year the hardware will be much more powerful at the same price (as LLM optimizations reach hardware), so you’d end up replacing the device frequently.
> I wonder if the market is strong enough for this
It is not.
You could not pay the average person to run a local LLM instead of just relying on Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/whatever is built into the apps and hardware they use every day.
You could sell these to HN commenters who will play with it for a week and then put it in the cupboard to gather dust next to their Raspberry Pis.
i have an rpi zero w (i think) that came as part of a voice kit - a cardboard box, an rgb led arcade button, a speaker, and a really COOL mems multi-microphone array pi zero hat. Out of the box it had raspbian or whatever on it, and a config file you edited while following instructions that came in the kit - you have to set up a firebase account, authorize the "app" on the pi, and so on. It basically gave you access to the google ecosystem in a tiny cardboard box, like a cube a baseball might fit in.
It didn't have a wakeword, you'd hit the arcade button (which had a dim color when inactive), it'd pulse white or blue, and then the assistant voice would ask whatever google assistants ask, and the light would change red, and you could ask your question, the light would pulse, and a second or two later, the assistant would talk, replying to your request or whtaever.
now, i am working from memory, so it may have been amazon services, but i am unsure if they allow third party access, and it may have immediately waited for your question when you pushed the button. I don't remember.
If i can find one of my boxes, in a closet gathering dust next to the rest of my rpi, i'll at least try to get the model/name of the microphone array hat, because i think that's the part that will make a DIY voice assistant work rather than be a curiosity.
mine stopped working after a few weeks, and i couldn't ever figure out why. I think maybe google or whatever wanted money for API usage, or they changed the rules of how firebase worked... but the hardware still works, it just doesn't "wake up" when you push the button. the logs show the button push, etc.
anyhow, i got the last two at target like 5(?) years ago, for $10 each. i think it was called "AIY Voice Kit"
Will they be sending all customers "Audio recording in progress" signs to post at the entrance of their homes? Or will the Alexa now say "By continuing to talk to this device you consent to audio recordings" every time the wake-word is detected?
Otherwise I can't see how this isn't blatantly violating 2-party consent laws in every state that has them, as Amazon can't reasonably claim they've received affirmative consent from every guest in their customers' homes...
I don't know if it did or didn't. Another comment says it didn't and you can verify this by monitoring its power and network usage, but...
I have not done this verification myself. I assume that every device and every piece of software is collecting data on me. I take some steps to reduce it (uBlock Origin in my browser, PiHole on my phone, don't use a fucking Amazon Echo), but I've just come to accept that companies don't give a shit about privacy and will get to know as much as they can about me so they can try to sell me things.
This headline is one of those things where if you're caught off-guard and are surprised, you're terrifyingly naive. Be upset, sure, but don't be surprised.
Yeah this feels like scaremongering when this is literally already the case anyway. Where do you think your voice is going? The echo is just a microphone and speaker. It can’t process anything.
2021+ Alexa models can perform voice processing locally. This is configured via Device Settings in the Alexa app. Speech recognition accuracy is slightly degraded for opt-in to local processing, https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-skips-the-cloud-with-local-...
> Amazon is switching on local voice recognition processing, promising users of some of its latest Echo smart speakers and smart displays that they can have their Alexa commands avoid the cloud completely... taps into the retail giant's homegrown AZ1 Neural Edge chipset.. followed Google, Apple, and others in creating its own custom silicon. While the AZ1 may not have been able to power the whole Alexa experience, it was focused instead on specific voice recognition features.
That’s cool. Didn’t know that was an option - But then what happens after that? Once it knows what you want to do a request is usually sent somewhere to fulfil it right?
A small minority of functions can be done without internet, e.g. control of local Zigbee devices connected to Echo's Zigbee hub. Most other functions, including control of local devices connected via WiFi, go through AWS/Alexa cloud. When local voice processing is enabled, only a text transcription of the voice request is sent to the cloud, not the captured audio.
(Echo 4 is one of the few Zigbee hub options with US firmware)
Is use of Alexa+ actually mandatory for an Echo moving forward? Can users choose to stay on their current semi-local system without AI like you can now?
That's the multi-million dollar question. Can they alter functionality of purchased devices so drastically, without exposure to class-action lawsuit about fitness for purpose? If an Echo Zigbee device is disconnected from the internet and currently working, how long will that continue to work?
If Echo Zigbee devices will effectively be bricked from their current offline purpose and use cases, it could motivate attempts to re-purpose the hardware. Has nothing been learned from the recent Sonos debacle?
"In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. "
Very nice (in a Christian Bale accent).
All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
I don’t need smart XYZ appliances that connect to the internet. After working a decade in the industry, I’ve seen enough of what these companies do with user data. No thank you.
Also, I don’t speak English at home. So that’s a hedge for now I guess.
> All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Not only could they listen at any time (albeit with lower quality), I put extremely personal information into my phone via the screen keyboard all the time. How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
> The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Let me just be the first to say I absolutely have an issue with smartphones.
(edit: Of course, I could very well count in the 'almost nobody' category, but the same might well be true in general for people concerned about smart devices.)
I also absolutely have an issue with smartphones and privacy.
But I'm also a pragmatist.
In my opinion Apple, while not even approaching being "perfect", are most likely to be the least worst of all practical options. 5 or 10 years back, I would have ranked Google's Pixel phones in 2nd, but not so much these days, if they're still 2nd they're a long long way back from 1st and only second because every other choice is so so bad. I used to buy Samsung phones back in the Galaxy S2 up to Galaxy S6 era, but they did so many bad-for-security things I no longer trust them with any of my data.
I don't trust any of the Chinese brand at all. Although I do have a few super inexpensive Chinese Android tablets that get used on a non internet connected subnet as home automation controllers. Even if they do manage to phone home, the only sensitive data they have is the private subnet wifi password and the always-on VPN endpoint through the router. I like to think (but cannot prove) that Chinese manufacturing hasn't managed to plant working backdoors in every iPhone they build, and that if they have targetted supply chain attacks for individual or small batches of devices that I'm not interesting enough to burn one of those on. I do sometimes wonder whether Jamal Khashoggi thought that too though...
I've "settled" with the level of security I believe my iPhone gives me. Partly because I long ago made peace with the fact that if a nation state security agency even became "interested" in my, I've already lost the game. I've given up trying to protect myself against the NSA or Mossad or the MSS or the FSB, or even "second tier" security agencies like my local ASIS. I do what I can to make it hard for adversaries like organised crime, scammers, script kiddies, and surveillance capitalists, and I'd like to think I've done enough that law enforcement (short of ASIS) probably can't access data on my devices via technical means (while knowing full well they have the capability to ruin my life if I refuse to hand over password and decryption keys).
I don't think apple is the best. You still end up with lots of data collection by Apple.
Degoogled Android like Graphene is way better for privacy as long as you are careful with the apps you install.
> How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
Probably because phone manufacturers have historically not done things as bad as Amazon has privacy-wise.
But you're right. They could.
Touche
They can technically store, but not always legally, since storage may be in violation of their privacy policy. For example, Apple won't store the audio, unless you opt in [1].
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...
Soft Welsh accents are really good for robots, because they combine the sort of officious, authoritative British English accent with a folksy, approachable quality. Then they wait for you to go to sleep…and with a lilting brogue glancing faintly off the meniscus of your dreams you hear, “Ay, oi, Dave! They’re out, it’s time.” and that’s how the world ends. A Welsh-accent LLM named “Dave” decides sheep husbandry is the maximally productive utility for the Earth and Solar System. Humanity is lost. Dave the AI companion from Swansea and a trillion sheep remain.
I'll poppity-ping to that.
What else do they do with the user data besides ads targeting? Serious question.
What if you're a green card holder and say "Palestine" in the privacy of your own home? We may not be there now but it's not far.
Non-issue. However if you start saying pro Hamas sentences..
I’ve seen privately identifiable information (PII) along with patient records sent over to 3rd party agencies.
A relative’s doctor’s practice just got acquired by one of these private-equity-backed profit-hungry medical chains.
I went with him to an appointment. As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet at the office, he had to sign away his HIPAA rights for them to sell his charts, along with his identity information, to advertisers or any other third parties. I was beside myself.
Wasn’t long afterward before he started seeing insultingly specific (but medically incorrect) prescription drug ads, almost exclusively, on his TV service.
> As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet
As with QR codes in restaurants, reception tablets with NDA boilerplate, or electronic security scanners, declining to use an electronic device can lead to the magical appearance of a manual alternative, where lines of text on paper can be crossed out manually before signing and taking a photo for your records.
This is because the consent (of 99% who will not decline) is only valid if the 1% who choose to decline can actually do so. If everyone is forced and it's literally impossible to decline consent, then none of it is consent, and they may as well omit the text and do whatever they want anyway. The act of asking consent for ridiculous terms is actually quite positive, if one ignores the implied pressure of a silicon wrapping.
For clarity sake, this is what "Do not send voice recordings" used to do [1]:
"Here’s how it works: When you turn on Do Not Send Voice Recordings and say your chosen wake word, an on-device algorithm will process and transcribe your request to Alexa from audio into text. The text is encrypted and sent to Amazon’s secure cloud where we can fulfill your interaction. After processing, the audio of your request is deleted."
So they transcribed the voice and sent the text to the cloud. Surprising that needs to go to allow GenAI to work?
Here's the email they sent: https://imgur.com/ZGPBwgZ
[1] https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=23727313011#:~:text=He...
I've always wondered what kinds of things can happen within the specifics of privacy policies nowadays.
Like I think it would be possible to have text/voice/object recognition work on the photos you send in an end-to-end encrypted chat app, described out-of-band and used for ... purposes.
Alexa with GenAI is a paid (via Prime for now) product, right?
Echo can work offline for control of Zigbee devices connected to Echo (non-Dot) Gen4, which is a Zigbee hub with US firmware. Voice commands such as "Turn Porch Light On" can be processed locally on Echo and executed immediately, without an internet connection, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
If an Alexa customer is using this offline functionality today, with no interest in GenAI or other online features, how can Amazon remove it?
Why bother to mandate telescreens in each home, when the people will do it themselves and willingly pay for the privilege of being monitored.
The Stasi or the KGB would have loved to install listening devices into everyone's homes, so they can monitor everyone. And here we are, people are voluntarily doing it. It's like a dream come true, just a few decades too late.
1984 but we chose it instead of it being forced on us.
Brave New World.
Fahrenheit 451 has whole rooms full of screens with, I think, virtual/pretend people that people enjoy talking to.
Not only did we choose it, we felt lucky to be alive in a time where we were afforded the privilege to purchase it
Right? Who honestly didn't think these devices would be used to spy on them and their homes? Even after reports of third party contractors listening to people having sex made headlines people continued to buy and keep them.
Just like some people need to touch a hot stove to learn they need to be careful some people will just refuse to accept anything bad is happening to them until they see it with their own eyes and surveillance capitalism exploits that by keeping the harms so removed from the collection of private data that most people will never accept the connection even after they're told about what's happening.
"In the future they will carry their telescreens with them, even into the bathroom."
Anyone have any experience with the offline OSS offerings?
Eager to replace my cheap Echo devices with more expensive privacy friendly options.
Another question: anyone aware of community custom firmware efforts? I know early gen devices had some exploits but it never resulted to much last I checked.
Home assistant is your gateway into this. You can even run it all locally with decent but not outrageous specs or plug into a cloud api. There is even an option to process home control locally and send other queries to the cloud.
I've used Home Assistant Voice (Preview Edition) and ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside Home Assistant 's Voice capabilities - by default there are phrases included, and you can add your own, but you have to be precise - "turn off the lights" and "turn off the lamp" are two separate phrases (or a variable one, which can be expanded by a locally (or not) hosted LLM.
Voice detection is pretty good, especially on the Voice, even from across a room. Not 100% (especially with higher pitched voices), but definitely high and usable. The main downside is the fact that you either need to host a local LLM, which isn't cheap, or predefine all phrases you want.
What has your experience been with Home Assistant voice? I also have one but still use my Alexa’s. I love HA and it runs my house but my initial tests were not great. I tried both OpenAI and HA cloud assistants but I could have spent more time tweaking things and I bet I could have done a lot by writing my own prompt.
I'd really love something that enabled me to use the hardware without Home Assistant. I know it's OSS (basically ESPhome), but I'd like a server I could point my Voice thing to and be able to receive a webhook with the text I just spoke, and have it read the text that my server returns out loud.
I'd implement the actual smarts myself, I just want the STT/TTS interface sorted.
Home Assistant uses the Wyoming protocol to talk to Whisper, Piper, and the various other components of the speech pipeline. Might be something to check out?
https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming
This subproject looks interesting too
https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming-handle-external
Yep, I had seen that but I didn't go deeper than that. I'll have another look, thanks!
It is literally impossible to transcribe voice, especially if you whisper. There's no way to model the language, it's too large - amanzon has many computers. Your computer is like a tortoise, it can't do text-to-speech. There's no way you can get any of this to use the Web, Dav... er, Cal. Trying to do this would be like trying to torch a python with your bare metal hands.
so in conclusion: nope.
Eh, Whisper is pretty good, especially if you have some GPU to throw at it.
huh, i've never heard of openai-whisper. I certainly didn't mention it in my first sentence.
You said "especially if you whisper" :-) for the skimming reader that parses as whisper the model. I have to admit I did it at first too.
Can anyone recommend some decent alternatives to Alexa? I like my home automation but I don't like this new privacy policy
Apple HomePod
Perfect timing for Apple and Google to promote their on-device TPU/NPU hardware and speech models..
Google is usually on the same page in this case. I wouldn’t trust anything remotely “privacy focused” that has the Google moniker on it. Apple maybe.
I don't trust Apple either. They also collect data and use it for advertising.
I’m getting more and more tempted to start a startup to sell a small box for a purely local LLM for HomeKit and google assistant control (and home assistant of course). I wonder if the market is strong enough for this. Sure, it won’t be GPT 4 level but it’ll definitely be better than Siri. Maybe YC 2026.
Like Home Assistant voice?
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
I have one, its only wake word detection, microphone, and HA integration. The STT, LLM, and TTS is completely independent of the Voice box.
Independent and optionally local, which is the important part.
I can use my HA Voice with a Local LLM, OpenAI, or Home Assistant cloud. Similar I can swap out TTS and STT with local versions if I want.
I've been wanting a local LLM appliance.
Tech is evolving too quickly; every year the hardware will be much more powerful at the same price (as LLM optimizations reach hardware), so you’d end up replacing the device frequently.
Like phones?
> I wonder if the market is strong enough for this
It is not.
You could not pay the average person to run a local LLM instead of just relying on Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/whatever is built into the apps and hardware they use every day.
You could sell these to HN commenters who will play with it for a week and then put it in the cupboard to gather dust next to their Raspberry Pis.
i have an rpi zero w (i think) that came as part of a voice kit - a cardboard box, an rgb led arcade button, a speaker, and a really COOL mems multi-microphone array pi zero hat. Out of the box it had raspbian or whatever on it, and a config file you edited while following instructions that came in the kit - you have to set up a firebase account, authorize the "app" on the pi, and so on. It basically gave you access to the google ecosystem in a tiny cardboard box, like a cube a baseball might fit in.
It didn't have a wakeword, you'd hit the arcade button (which had a dim color when inactive), it'd pulse white or blue, and then the assistant voice would ask whatever google assistants ask, and the light would change red, and you could ask your question, the light would pulse, and a second or two later, the assistant would talk, replying to your request or whtaever.
now, i am working from memory, so it may have been amazon services, but i am unsure if they allow third party access, and it may have immediately waited for your question when you pushed the button. I don't remember.
If i can find one of my boxes, in a closet gathering dust next to the rest of my rpi, i'll at least try to get the model/name of the microphone array hat, because i think that's the part that will make a DIY voice assistant work rather than be a curiosity.
mine stopped working after a few weeks, and i couldn't ever figure out why. I think maybe google or whatever wanted money for API usage, or they changed the rules of how firebase worked... but the hardware still works, it just doesn't "wake up" when you push the button. the logs show the button push, etc.
anyhow, i got the last two at target like 5(?) years ago, for $10 each. i think it was called "AIY Voice Kit"
I’m not sure if you’re telling me that I’m right or that I’m wrong.
Given Donald and NSA, is this wise?
Even without either of them these devices were a terrible idea.
You're not wrong but maybe more people will care if there is a figurehead they can hate.
[dead]
The NSA has been spying on US citizens far longer than Donald has...
So the same folks complains about lack of AI in Alexa are complaining now? - cloud level processing is needed for the gen ai features
Were there real people complaining about that? Or just investors?
Yup, I can’t wait to have a nice LLM capability on my Alexa devices! Maybe I’m the only one on this thread :)
is it though?
My phone and TV already use anything I see and listen to everything I say. Echo doesn't seem to be doing anything different.
I cancelled my Prime subscription, will ditch my Echo.
Will they be sending all customers "Audio recording in progress" signs to post at the entrance of their homes? Or will the Alexa now say "By continuing to talk to this device you consent to audio recordings" every time the wake-word is detected?
Otherwise I can't see how this isn't blatantly violating 2-party consent laws in every state that has them, as Amazon can't reasonably claim they've received affirmative consent from every guest in their customers' homes...
It won't because I never invited one into my home because why the bloody hell would I want a listening device in my house in the first place?
As if it already wasn't?
I don't know if it did or didn't. Another comment says it didn't and you can verify this by monitoring its power and network usage, but...
I have not done this verification myself. I assume that every device and every piece of software is collecting data on me. I take some steps to reduce it (uBlock Origin in my browser, PiHole on my phone, don't use a fucking Amazon Echo), but I've just come to accept that companies don't give a shit about privacy and will get to know as much as they can about me so they can try to sell me things.
This headline is one of those things where if you're caught off-guard and are surprised, you're terrifyingly naive. Be upset, sure, but don't be surprised.
It sounds like newer devices had a Do Not Send Voice Recordings option that transcribed and processed queries locally.
Yes, it wasn't. You can check by measuring power usage and data volume over time.
Yeah this feels like scaremongering when this is literally already the case anyway. Where do you think your voice is going? The echo is just a microphone and speaker. It can’t process anything.
2021+ Alexa models can perform voice processing locally. This is configured via Device Settings in the Alexa app. Speech recognition accuracy is slightly degraded for opt-in to local processing, https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-skips-the-cloud-with-local-...
> Amazon is switching on local voice recognition processing, promising users of some of its latest Echo smart speakers and smart displays that they can have their Alexa commands avoid the cloud completely... taps into the retail giant's homegrown AZ1 Neural Edge chipset.. followed Google, Apple, and others in creating its own custom silicon. While the AZ1 may not have been able to power the whole Alexa experience, it was focused instead on specific voice recognition features.
That’s cool. Didn’t know that was an option - But then what happens after that? Once it knows what you want to do a request is usually sent somewhere to fulfil it right?
A small minority of functions can be done without internet, e.g. control of local Zigbee devices connected to Echo's Zigbee hub. Most other functions, including control of local devices connected via WiFi, go through AWS/Alexa cloud. When local voice processing is enabled, only a text transcription of the voice request is sent to the cloud, not the captured audio.
(Echo 4 is one of the few Zigbee hub options with US firmware)
Is use of Alexa+ actually mandatory for an Echo moving forward? Can users choose to stay on their current semi-local system without AI like you can now?
That's the multi-million dollar question. Can they alter functionality of purchased devices so drastically, without exposure to class-action lawsuit about fitness for purpose? If an Echo Zigbee device is disconnected from the internet and currently working, how long will that continue to work?
If Echo Zigbee devices will effectively be bricked from their current offline purpose and use cases, it could motivate attempts to re-purpose the hardware. Has nothing been learned from the recent Sonos debacle?
"In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. "
kitchen timers galore
I have mine set to muted. Using LLMs will drastically improve Alexa. It's near brain-dead with that puny CPU in it.
Take that, terrorists.
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It's dumb to buy this device and turn on the setting. Just don't buy the device.