4 ms·

I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.

by ohyes 8y ago

rdl 8y ago
Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.
- Amezarak 8y ago
  > Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    For unrestricted language, without training?
    - Amezarak 8y ago
      Yes to the former, pretty much for the latter - the "training" I recall was less than a minute long and consisted of repeating one or two example sentences, hardly anything that would be an adoption impediment to devices like an Echo. The resulting voice recognition worked, in my experience, better than that on modern Android phones.
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        I'm pretty skeptical of this. Apple has a pretty good commitment to privacy, one that is costing them on the AI front, and as far as I can tell they still upload Siri audio to the cloud for processing. If this was easy to do 10 years ago, I think Apple would at least offer as an option.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Pretty sure this isn't true. Siri won't work for me if I don't have an Internet connection.
  - majormajor 8y ago
    That's not why people I know say Siri sucks: for us it's because it can't look up as much info as Amazon or Google. It understands the query, it just can't do as much with it.
  - rdl 8y ago
    Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform. But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)
jsight 8y ago
Because it makes the voice recognition vastly better. Have you ever noticed that Google can get words correct in navigational searches, even if it only sounds like the name? We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.

I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.

by ohyes 8y ago

I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.

rdl 8y ago

Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices. I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.

Amezarak 8y ago
> Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  For unrestricted language, without training?
  - Amezarak 8y ago
    Yes to the former, pretty much for the latter - the "training" I recall was less than a minute long and consisted of repeating one or two example sentences, hardly anything that would be an adoption impediment to devices like an Echo. The resulting voice recognition worked, in my experience, better than that on modern Android phones.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      I'm pretty skeptical of this. Apple has a pretty good commitment to privacy, one that is costing them on the AI front, and as far as I can tell they still upload Siri audio to the cloud for processing. If this was easy to do 10 years ago, I think Apple would at least offer as an option.
colejohnson66 8y ago
It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Pretty sure this isn't true. Siri won't work for me if I don't have an Internet connection.
- majormajor 8y ago
  That's not why people I know say Siri sucks: for us it's because it can't look up as much info as Amazon or Google. It understands the query, it just can't do as much with it.
- rdl 8y ago
  Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform. But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)

jsight 8y ago

Because it makes the voice recognition vastly better. Have you ever noticed that Google can get words correct in navigational searches, even if it only sounds like the name? We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.