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Living with and building for the Amazon Echo
- noja 11y agoSounds great. audio jack: I like that it doesn't have an audio jack. I already have a Fire TV connected to my tv setup, it should play the audio there.
- LastMuel 11y agoHonestly, do you leave your television on 24/7?
- noja 11y agoIn standby. The TV supports CEC so would turn on when asked.
- Klathmon 11y agoYeah, but in practice CEC has been iffy on most TVs i've owned, and i've never seen a TV that can startup in less than 10 seconds. Plus AFAIK CEC can't turn back off the TV, so after the first use it's just on forever until you manually turn it off.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- veli_joza 11y agoMy main reason for not getting one is that it's tied to services that are not available in my country (Amazon Prime, Spotify...). It seems like the rest of services ("Skills") are third-party citizens on this device. Although I can appreciate the sleek design of Echo, I'd rather get an opensource variant (Jasper and Mycroft are ones I heard of).
- david_mitchell 11y agoThis is something I would both love to develop something for but could never allow into my house. I know I could do both but it feels kind of wrong to make anything that might encourage other people to have one given the terrifying privacy implications.
- IanCal 11y agoYou might want to have a look at jasper: http://jasperproject.github.io/ http://jasperproject.github.io/ You can use an offline speech recognition engine in that.
- StavrosK 11y agoHow well does it work? I think recognition latency is pretty large.
- colinramsay 11y agoIt has different speech recognition back-ends so it depends on which you use.
- StavrosK 11y agoAFAIK PocketSphinx is the only engine that doesn't send all your audio over the internet, which is the only acceptable use case for me. I'll try training Julius, though, it sounds like it may be the best solution to the problem.
- CaptSpify 11y agoI use this. Yes, latency is kind of big, but it's tolerable. The big difference for me is that you have to program every command. I've never used the Echo, but my understanding is that it has a ton of pre-built commands that you can use: set a timer, what is the weather, play somesong, etc. For jasper (pocketsphinx) you have to manually program the action for all of these. So it's a lot more setup. I still like it and use it all the time though.
- bamie9l 11y agoI find something worryingly Orwellian about an always on listener in your home that monitors for keywords via a remote server.
- pmarreck 11y agoThe monitoring for keywords is done in the hardware or firmware. Nothing ever gets sent to Amazon until "Alexa" or "Echo" is recognized. Do you really think it would be easy to hide a persistent audio datastream to a central server?
- vehementi 11y agoWould not need to be persistent or audio to get the job done
- dantillberg 11y ago> The monitoring for keywords is done in the hardware or firmware. Nothing ever gets sent to Amazon until "Alexa" or "Echo" is recognized. I think that what you mean is that the monitoring is done in the hardware or firmware using closed-source code that can and will be regularly updated remotely and hopefully securely. And that Amazon told us that it would wait until it thought it heard "Alexa" or "Echo" or anything that sounds sort of like it, or whatever they decide to change the software on your particular device to listen for in the future.
- te_chris 11y agoI've got one, I find it mostly useless as I can't set my location to London. The speaker is fine - but I have a much better system in the same room with an apple tv (v2) connected with a dac. I guess it's just me, but I also like controlling what I'm listening to and having some agency over it, so just mindlessly listening to playlists or automated radio isn't really my thing. I think it is cool that it's programmable, but I'm not that impressed thus far. (I should add, the reason I have one is that it was a gift from AMZN after attending an event of theirs last year, I didn't buy it)
- dharma1 11y agoI've been trying to find a usb array mic/software combo that works better for far field sound capture than a single mic - to use with either OK Google on old android phones, or Jasper running on Rpi.. Any recommendations?
- StavrosK 11y agoI would also love having something like this. I found the Playstation Eye camera for PS3 has an array of four mics, but there's no accompanying software, so it's not as useful. I'd buy a hardware/software combo that did far-field sound capture well. Essentially, I want a better mic so I can run this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eiHO7uqccs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eiHO7uqccs
- dharma1 11y agoYeah, same here, PS3 Eye but no drivers/software for array mics or beamforming. I wanted to create something like in that video too. Looks promising with OK Google - a little laggy/glitchy but the idea definitely has legs. I think in a couple of years this stuff will become ubiquitous
- StavrosK 11y agoI hope so, and I certainly hope that we'll see hardware-only solutions with open software so I know where my sound is going.
- dharma1 11y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure we'll have state-of-the-art open source deep learning based speech recognition libraries this year that will run on local hardware without significant latency. Baidu open sourced their warp CTC a few weeks ago, give it another few months before someone will release a trained English network for it https://github.com/baidu-research/warp-ctc https://github.com/baidu-research/warp-ctc
- jimmcslim 11y ago
- deanCommie 11y agoI think the audio out isn't going to happen as Amazon would prefer the 3rd parties built their own integration to Alexa into their devices: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-service https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-vo...
- peteretep 11y agoI note that Siri on my iPhone does much of this, and is also always listening. Siri switches my lights on, tells me what time it is in London, makes calls, and sets timers for me, and with the newer phones, doesn't require the phone to be plugged in.
- return0 11y agoSounds like it would work better as a watch. OTOH, having a platform that accepts questions (even in written form, i.e. an NLP google) on which we could build on would be great.
- mhd 11y agoJudging from the questions listed in the article, I would assume that there's a way smaller ROI for an European homebody (fewer services that can be queried/integrated, usually worse language recognition, no need to constantly check the weather, public transport).
- WhitneyLand 11y agoIdeally Echo would be able to control HomeKit devices. iPhone users now have no Nest integration, no Echo. Starting to kill the idea of an open ecosystem.
- asg 11y agoI've wanted something like this for years, I can easily see why this is awsome. I considered the Echo seriously when it came out. However, even as an Amazon Prime member, I'm hesitant to have amazon in my living room. I don't want to tie that deeply into a single ecosystem. Therefore, I am eagerly waiting for my Mycroft[1]... One for every room! If your are willing to muck about with hardware, the Jasper project does a lot of this already. [1] https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
- roel_v 11y agoWho wants to have a black box in their home (or bedroom!) that listens to every sound, connects to the internet and over which you have no control? Sure I believe Amazon when they say they only send clips of the actual commands, but how long before these things get rooted left and right? I build my own version of this, which I can customize as I want. I can get the weather (my central home automation server pulls forecasts from wunderground.com, current temp from my own sensors, the voice control unit then pulls data from there), open/close curtains and turn lights on/off, and it says the time. I have a small list of other 'dialogues' (as they're called in my system) I'm going to add when I have some time, but I'm still figuring out what functionality is worthwhile. My software is based on pocketsphinx on raspi, so it's easy to put one in each room (I have only one now myself). I'm using a mxl ac404 teleconf mic, which works ok; you do have to speak up for it to pick up the commands. I'd love to get an echo to see how much better it works. I have a primitive 'tts' system that plays back prerecorded messages, and falls back to festival for unknown words. I paid a voice actor a bit through fiverr to get the 100 or so words I need. Sounds better than full synthetic tts systems, although I need to work on improving the timing between words. This is only a few days worth of work, too. It's not hard to make. I'm not claiming my systems works as well as an echo, but I prefer the control mine gives me.
- AndrewUnmuted 11y ago> Sure I believe Amazon when they say they only send clips of the actual commands I worked on speech parsing software at Audible, where much of the data was originally gathered to make Alexa and the Echo possible. They are not telling the truth when they say that they only send clips of the actual commands. EDIT: This is not to say that they constantly stream audio data, either. But they send much more than just the voice extractions of the commands themselves. They have to in order to build a profile of the users' voices, habits, etc., which aid in the quick processing of incoming speech data. The service is not selective enough to only pick up on voice information proceeded by a correct utterance of "Alexa." Amazon is "customer-obsessed" - and one of the product execs asked on a phone call: > I am an Alexa user, and call out her name but stutter slightly. I still intended to say "Alexa," so why shouldn't she respond to me? That's a bad user experience. Customers want to be understood, not ignored. This is paraphrased, but the consequences of this question were enormous. It basically ensured that Alexa users would not ever have privacy again.
- ChikkaChiChi 11y agoI bit the privacy bullet and got an Echo for my home theater. It's nice, but there is a mountain of unrecognized value because of Amazon's desire to control everything. As a for instance, it would be nice if keyword enablement could mute the stereo. It'd be nice to Chromecast audio to it. It'd be nice if I could use it to play things on a fire stick. If it really wanted to be a device of the future, it would link to other Echoes in the house, allowed for intercom, and localized audio tracking. Some of these things will either come or never see the light of day because Amazon hates interacting with other companies (see: Android). I'm waiting for an open source alternative...
- debuasca 11y ago2001 A Space Odyssey: Hal
- silverlight 11y agoI've had the Echo a bit longer (6 months? We were in the first batch that went out to Prime customers) and we love it as well. I also want to get one for the whole house instead of just currently the basement. In addition to music and trivia and timers, we also use our to control our lighting (via the Hue stuff from Phillips) and we love that as well. Overall it's amazing.
- chatmasta 11y agoGenerally you're operating in one of two modes: 1) you don't believe anyone is listening, and even if they are, you don't care 2) you don't believe anyone is listening, but if they are, the consequences are worth avoiding If you find yourself in the #2 mode, don't buy an Amazon Echo.