5 ms·

Great - an always-on microphone in my home that sends all of my conversations and interactions directly to Amazon for analysis

jpb0104 11y ago
Not exactly. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
famousactress 11y ago
Let's be fair, the product is designed to specifically not do that: "Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the Alexa Voice Service to recognize and respond to your request."
- sillygoose 11y ago
  Right, and we can just take their word for it because.. Don't Be Evil?
mkoryak 11y ago
yeah, kind of like your cellphone.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  What cell phone? Of course, given that a lot of the HN crowd currently derives their income from surveillance and/or walled-garden based business models ("analytics", "big data", "software as a service", etc), I expect to be down-voted for suggesting that it is a bad idea to trade your future for a few shiny (and sometimes useful) toys. I hope everybody that uses Amazon's microphone - or, as you say, a cell phone - realize that you're creating the surveillance state. Right now there is a large effort to normalize surveillance socially, and instead of fighting for you right to privacy, we have a threat full of people talking about how wonderful the bait tastes.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    We need AGPL algorithms and training datasets for voice recognition, plus user-programmable open-source firmware for on-device wake word recognition. If we can end the false privacy-convenience tradeoff, then the technology can be applied for goals defined by users rather than select business interests. Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a mature proprietary product that runs locally on Windows. It has an SDK for custom integration, http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index.htm http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

jpb0104 11y ago

Not exactly. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

famousactress 11y ago

Let's be fair, the product is designed to specifically not do that: "Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the Alexa Voice Service to recognize and respond to your request."

sillygoose 11y ago
Right, and we can just take their word for it because.. Don't Be Evil?

mkoryak 11y ago

yeah, kind of like your cellphone.

pdkl95 11y ago
What cell phone? Of course, given that a lot of the HN crowd currently derives their income from surveillance and/or walled-garden based business models ("analytics", "big data", "software as a service", etc), I expect to be down-voted for suggesting that it is a bad idea to trade your future for a few shiny (and sometimes useful) toys. I hope everybody that uses Amazon's microphone - or, as you say, a cell phone - realize that you're creating the surveillance state. Right now there is a large effort to normalize surveillance socially, and instead of fighting for you right to privacy, we have a threat full of people talking about how wonderful the bait tastes.
- walterbell 11y ago
  We need AGPL algorithms and training datasets for voice recognition, plus user-programmable open-source firmware for on-device wake word recognition. If we can end the false privacy-convenience tradeoff, then the technology can be applied for goals defined by users rather than select business interests. Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a mature proprietary product that runs locally on Windows. It has an SDK for custom integration, http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index.htm http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]