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Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And

Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?

Flammy 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data. We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know. Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.
- troncheadle 10y ago
  > but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users. Almost definitely yes. I've never known a tech company that truly deletes anything
  - api 10y ago
    "Never really delete" is actually standard advice. There are loads of reasons, mostly non-nefarious, why you may want or need that data. Sometimes deleted stuff is archived offline or in slow warehouse databases that are not live, etc.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Can't vote you up enough.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.
  - Flammy 10y ago
    I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business. Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same: > Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-parrot-7d392bf32ef2#.xux30jpfe https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...
  - mysterydip 10y ago
    I would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).
clavalle 10y ago
Unless the guy said "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" or "Alexa, play 'The Sound of Silence'" just after the time of death, I think you are right. I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.
praseodym 10y ago
Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data. [1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
- amelius 10y ago
  You could even convert it to text before sending.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Especially since Alexa already converts it to text! It wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility. Would it be possible to test this? Check the battery life of the Dot in a completely silent room vs the battery life of a Dot listening to an audiobook played on repeat. If it is actually listening and transcribing it should have a higher power consumption and thus die faster - right?
  - ethbro 10y ago
    For NLP research, you'd want something that preserved more information than text. Questions for anyone in the field: how much is preserved? Is there a < audio but > text form that allows for iterative testing? Maybe the output of a first-pass pheneme decoder? If so, what kind of space requirements?
- sdegutis 10y ago
  In fact that's just 40gb per year, which is pretty doable even on a local SD card that Alexa could be fitted with. Or even if it stores one month and deletes the oldest one every day, that's still 3gb. Very doable.
- agentgt 10y ago
  It is also feasible the device could just wait and transmit only voice like data and drop other sound data... (Even my crummy baby monitor can detect the difference.) Speaking of which I wonder what the net traffic usage of the Echo is?
MiddleEndian 10y ago
Https://ubrp.arizona.edu/study-finds-no-difference-in-the-amount-men-and-women-talk/ Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive. Edited with better source/numbers.
- 9NRtKyP4 10y ago
  > There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Well shit my bad. That was the top result from Google with just those numbers quoted when I searched for average number of words spoken per day. I should've been more thorough. Let me see if I can find better numbers. Edit: Done
MichaelGG 10y ago
A year of audio at 32kbps (more than enough for speech) is only 120GB. That's only a couple bucks of month on S3 -- at retail pricing. So it's technically and financially feasible to store everything if Amazon wanted to.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  If it's just spoken voice, the customary value is actually 8kbps, mono.
cryptarch 10y ago
It would cost about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m Alexa's are active at any given point in time that works out to 380k PB. Ok, that doesn't work yet. However, if you then layer on a flagging system, where only certain users' full record is stored, or only "suspicious incidents" are stored, and you get this down to only flagging 0.1% of all data, you arrive at 380PB of storage. Amazon Glacier costs about $88.000 a year per PB, but there's a profit margin included in that, so I'll assume it costs Amazon just $75k a year. In conclusion, it would cost Amazon about $28.5m a year to run such a system. That's certainly within the realm of possibility and of what LE/SIGINT clients would pay; I assume the NSA would gladly pay that sum x100 for that capability. Sounds like it'd be booming business for Amazon.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  I think you're orders of magnitude off in marginal cost estimates for glacier users. Datacenters are being built out for a small number of commercial users (e.g. Amazon's core business) and the size of modern HDDs would lead me to estimate that storage is about free in a modern datacenter, the scarce resource is disk-time for read/write operations. That is, projects like glacier let Amazon sell disk that would have otherwise been stranded. It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    I'm not in the datacenter business, so I've been conservative for lack of experience with storage at PB scale. I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing: 30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions. Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.
api 10y ago
How many other words and sounds sound a bit like Alexa?
tyho 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard About $2.55 / year [0][1][2], or, storing in AWS S3 "Infrequent access storage", about $180 after 5 years of recording [3][4]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_Bitrates https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb... [3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2FGB%2FMonth+*+24+Kb%2Fs)*(5+years)%5E2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2F...
bsharitt 10y ago
Even if Amazon doesn't store all audio by default now, I would if it could become a thing(if it's not already) for law enforcement to basically get a warrant for Amazon(and Google and everyone else who gets into this space) to store everything and send it to law enforcement for specific individuals.
sixothree 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. Actually it would be less than 60 GB per device per year for 24 hour recording at 15 kilobits per second CBR. This includes all silent hours. My guess would be less than 5 GB per device per year to record all spoken words.
visarga 10y ago
> Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".
hueving 10y ago
Don't confuse what you are allowed to see in the app with what Alexa captured and sent to Amazon. There is no reason to think they are equivalent.

Flammy 10y ago

> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data. We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know. Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.

troncheadle 10y ago
> but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users. Almost definitely yes. I've never known a tech company that truly deletes anything
- api 10y ago
  "Never really delete" is actually standard advice. There are loads of reasons, mostly non-nefarious, why you may want or need that data. Sometimes deleted stuff is archived offline or in slow warehouse databases that are not live, etc.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Can't vote you up enough.
wccrawford 10y ago
If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.
- Flammy 10y ago
  I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business. Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same: > Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-parrot-7d392bf32ef2#.xux30jpfe https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...
- mysterydip 10y ago
  I would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).

clavalle 10y ago

Unless the guy said "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" or "Alexa, play 'The Sound of Silence'" just after the time of death, I think you are right. I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.

praseodym 10y ago

Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data. [1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...

amelius 10y ago
You could even convert it to text before sending.
- Nadya 10y ago
  Especially since Alexa already converts it to text! It wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility. Would it be possible to test this? Check the battery life of the Dot in a completely silent room vs the battery life of a Dot listening to an audiobook played on repeat. If it is actually listening and transcribing it should have a higher power consumption and thus die faster - right?
- ethbro 10y ago
  For NLP research, you'd want something that preserved more information than text. Questions for anyone in the field: how much is preserved? Is there a < audio but > text form that allows for iterative testing? Maybe the output of a first-pass pheneme decoder? If so, what kind of space requirements?
sdegutis 10y ago
In fact that's just 40gb per year, which is pretty doable even on a local SD card that Alexa could be fitted with. Or even if it stores one month and deletes the oldest one every day, that's still 3gb. Very doable.
agentgt 10y ago
It is also feasible the device could just wait and transmit only voice like data and drop other sound data... (Even my crummy baby monitor can detect the difference.) Speaking of which I wonder what the net traffic usage of the Echo is?

MiddleEndian 10y ago

Https://ubrp.arizona.edu/study-finds-no-difference-in-the-amount-men-and-women-talk/ Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive. Edited with better source/numbers.

9NRtKyP4 10y ago
> There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Well shit my bad. That was the top result from Google with just those numbers quoted when I searched for average number of words spoken per day. I should've been more thorough. Let me see if I can find better numbers. Edit: Done

MichaelGG 10y ago

A year of audio at 32kbps (more than enough for speech) is only 120GB. That's only a couple bucks of month on S3 -- at retail pricing. So it's technically and financially feasible to store everything if Amazon wanted to.

jsjohnst 10y ago
If it's just spoken voice, the customary value is actually 8kbps, mono.

cryptarch 10y ago

It would cost about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m Alexa's are active at any given point in time that works out to 380k PB. Ok, that doesn't work yet. However, if you then layer on a flagging system, where only certain users' full record is stored, or only "suspicious incidents" are stored, and you get this down to only flagging 0.1% of all data, you arrive at 380PB of storage. Amazon Glacier costs about $88.000 a year per PB, but there's a profit margin included in that, so I'll assume it costs Amazon just $75k a year. In conclusion, it would cost Amazon about $28.5m a year to run such a system. That's certainly within the realm of possibility and of what LE/SIGINT clients would pay; I assume the NSA would gladly pay that sum x100 for that capability. Sounds like it'd be booming business for Amazon.

dannypgh 10y ago
I think you're orders of magnitude off in marginal cost estimates for glacier users. Datacenters are being built out for a small number of commercial users (e.g. Amazon's core business) and the size of modern HDDs would lead me to estimate that storage is about free in a modern datacenter, the scarce resource is disk-time for read/write operations. That is, projects like glacier let Amazon sell disk that would have otherwise been stranded. It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  I'm not in the datacenter business, so I've been conservative for lack of experience with storage at PB scale. I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing: 30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions. Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.

api 10y ago

How many other words and sounds sound a bit like Alexa?

tyho 10y ago

> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard About $2.55 / year [0][1][2], or, storing in AWS S3 "Infrequent access storage", about $180 after 5 years of recording [3][4]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_Bitrates https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb... [3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2FGB%2FMonth+*+24+Kb%2Fs)*(5+years)%5E2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2F...

bsharitt 10y ago

Even if Amazon doesn't store all audio by default now, I would if it could become a thing(if it's not already) for law enforcement to basically get a warrant for Amazon(and Google and everyone else who gets into this space) to store everything and send it to law enforcement for specific individuals.

sixothree 10y ago

> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. Actually it would be less than 60 GB per device per year for 24 hour recording at 15 kilobits per second CBR. This includes all silent hours. My guess would be less than 5 GB per device per year to record all spoken words.

visarga 10y ago

> Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".

hueving 10y ago

Don't confuse what you are allowed to see in the app with what Alexa captured and sent to Amazon. There is no reason to think they are equivalent.