5 ms·

Your most solid guarantee that your device isn't constantly spying on you is a battery. Listening for words is power-intensive.

mikeash 9y ago
Recording at a low (but still intelligible) bitrate and uploading it when connected to power would be pretty easy on the battery.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in speech recognition, is there a low bitrate which is still intelligible to speech recognition engines, or is this still a domain that the human brain has enough of an advantage?
  - ryanplant-au 9y ago
    What do you consider to be low? Anecdotally, the Google app on my phone almost perfectly recognised, played over speakers, this fairly rapid dialogue between two people encoded as 6 Kbit/sec Opus. https://ryanplant.net/love.wav https://ryanplant.net/love.wav Its only mistake was missing the "you" in "you want to be." Codec2 remains fairly clear down to human ears down to 2.4 Kbit/sec but I had no luck getting it recognised, even with much simpler and clearer samples. This individual anecdote tells you nothing about the state of the art, but I wanted to note it anyway because I was astonished at how well 6 Kbit/sec is handled.
    - oneweekwonder 9y ago
      I'm aware I don't know what I'm talking about. But the love.wav gives a bit rate of 768kbps, 6 sec of audio at 571 KB storage size. Another poster also did the math on 5.6 kbit/s (700 bytes/s). > 5.6 * 60 * 60 / 1024 / 8 = 2.4609375 MB/hr But should that 5.6 not be 768 to get love.wav voice quality? What am I missing like a moron? Thanks for the example and anecdote, something to actually grasp in trying to understand the problem.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        The wav file is decompressed, so you can’t just look at the size of the file.
        oneweekwonder 9y ago
        I'm not looking at the file size. I'm looking at the kbps the os reported for the wave file, which is 768kbps. Where 6 Kbit/sec mentioned.
        mikeash 9y ago
        The reported kbps is just the file size divided by the duration.
Joeri 9y ago
We’ve all had unexpected battery drains on our phones. For me the most solid guarantee is the lack of a business case. Why risk the huge fallout of when this spying is inevitably uncovered when the profit to be had of listening in to people’s private conversations at scale is small. Individual private conversations might carry huge value, but discerning those from casual conversation at scale is next to impossible.

mikeash 9y ago

Recording at a low (but still intelligible) bitrate and uploading it when connected to power would be pretty easy on the battery.

kbenson 9y ago
I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in speech recognition, is there a low bitrate which is still intelligible to speech recognition engines, or is this still a domain that the human brain has enough of an advantage?
- ryanplant-au 9y ago
  What do you consider to be low? Anecdotally, the Google app on my phone almost perfectly recognised, played over speakers, this fairly rapid dialogue between two people encoded as 6 Kbit/sec Opus. https://ryanplant.net/love.wav https://ryanplant.net/love.wav Its only mistake was missing the "you" in "you want to be." Codec2 remains fairly clear down to human ears down to 2.4 Kbit/sec but I had no luck getting it recognised, even with much simpler and clearer samples. This individual anecdote tells you nothing about the state of the art, but I wanted to note it anyway because I was astonished at how well 6 Kbit/sec is handled.
  - oneweekwonder 9y ago
    I'm aware I don't know what I'm talking about. But the love.wav gives a bit rate of 768kbps, 6 sec of audio at 571 KB storage size. Another poster also did the math on 5.6 kbit/s (700 bytes/s). > 5.6 * 60 * 60 / 1024 / 8 = 2.4609375 MB/hr But should that 5.6 not be 768 to get love.wav voice quality? What am I missing like a moron? Thanks for the example and anecdote, something to actually grasp in trying to understand the problem.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      The wav file is decompressed, so you can’t just look at the size of the file.
      - oneweekwonder 9y ago
        I'm not looking at the file size. I'm looking at the kbps the os reported for the wave file, which is 768kbps. Where 6 Kbit/sec mentioned.
        mikeash 9y ago
        The reported kbps is just the file size divided by the duration.

Joeri 9y ago

We’ve all had unexpected battery drains on our phones. For me the most solid guarantee is the lack of a business case. Why risk the huge fallout of when this spying is inevitably uncovered when the profit to be had of listening in to people’s private conversations at scale is small. Individual private conversations might carry huge value, but discerning those from casual conversation at scale is next to impossible.