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Ok, but the whole "Is it possible?" section is predicated on a totally false assumption: > To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your pho
by 3131s 9y ago
Ok, but the whole "Is it possible?" section is predicated on a totally false assumption:
> To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it's on. This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you've got your phone on half the day, that's about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US, so that's about 20 petabytes per day, just in the US.
No, all they need to do is use the client device to perform speech-to-text and send the tiny amount of resulting data.
I don't think Facebook records people's conversations, but I also don't buy this article's other arguments that 1) conversation data is not useful to advertisers and 2) Facebook would not at least make a semi-successful attempt at analyzing natural language data with their existing NLP tools.
- snowwrestler 9y ago> No, all they need to do is use the client device to perform speech-to-text On an iPhone, Apple has the full run of all device capabilities, and can even ship custom chips, but they still stream audio back to a server to process what people say to Siri. Speech to text is very hard even when the speaker is purposefully speaking to the device. It would be way harder to try to extract meaning out of ambient audio.
- danso 9y agoIt is misleading to argue that FB has to store that data. But he addresses the "all they need to do is use the client device to perform speech-to-text" part: > Because it has no specific trigger word for Facebook, your phone would need to listen for every targetable keyword. That means the speech-to-text translation code could only run on your phone itself, a taxing demand even for the beefy cloud servers that usually handle those tasks. What app currently does speech-to-text translation with any usable accuracy on the device? Even Siri and dedicated-devices such as Alexa don't seem to attempt anything beyond trigger-word recognition locally.
- flukus 9y agoThis is 90's tech, we had speech-to-text working back then for full dictation which is way beyond the needs of facebook for scanning for keywords. Having high accuracy wouldn't be important in the same way it is for Siri et al.
- khedoros1 9y agoI think you'd run into complaints about constantly-hot phones and short battery lives doing that, not to mention end up with untrustworthy transcriptions.