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Amazon researcher explains science behind Alexa's newly announced whisper mode
- mattnewton 8y agoI realize I’m not the target audience of the smart speaker but I already carry a silent interface to anything I would like to do with Alexa in my pocket. Listening to whispers is creepy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- beauzero 8y ago"If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in..." considering the other person as Alexa bothers me. I appreciate the tech but the fact that Alexa/Amazon corporate is participating, even passively, in interactions with my children and myself causes me pause.
- misabon 8y agoThen why buy it, dude? Do you think Alexa isn’t listening to you when you scold your kids in the kitchen? Seriously.
- beauzero 8y agoI haven't purchased one. Good research should be encouraged. Ethical implications of implementations should be discussed openly.
- misabon 8y agoHis isn’t ethical implications discussion. This is you using every one of these feature release pages as your product review page. If nothing has changed about your position why even tell us? It’s like all those people who comment on software built with Go. “I don’t understand why Terraform uses Golang. It has no generics” That’s not “programming language feature discussion”. It’s obsessively off-topic behaviour.
- Invictus0 8y agoIf having an always-on microphone in your home didn't already give you pause, I fail to see how this development changes things significantly.
- PacifyFish 8y agoI think the sleeping child is the "other person" here.
- SweetLlamaMyth 8y agoI'm not sure the takeaway here is that anybody's conferring personhood on Alexa. I think they're just pointing out that there's meaning conveyed in speech beyond just the content of the words spoken. Regardless of what words someone says, saying it in a whisper implies something about the volume that other parties should respond with. I had a coworker with laryngitis last winter, and I found myself unconsciously lowering my volume to be closer to his raspy voice. Tone and volume of speech can communicate a lot; why not allow a spoken word interface to leverage that extra information?
- b_tterc_p 8y agoI trust these guys know what they’re doing, but determining a whisper from a spoken word doesn’t sound like a difficult problem. I think they should have just used a logistic regression first given that it seems they’re not sure how the model works and whether the last 50 frames matter due to systemic biases in the data collection or actual trends. The graph of their posterior confuses me a bit too. Is the model predicting individually for each frame? Or is it contextualized for all previous frames up to that point? If it’s the former, their approach to picking a conclusion seems off, if it’s the latter, I would question their model. Edit: although I suppose the graph shown could be one of the better looking cases of certainty and not reflective of their typical result
- abtinf 8y agoIn my college phonetics class, we studied spectrograms of various human sounds. The spectrogram of whispers is very different from normal speech - it almost just looks like white noise. Forget computers, it is remarkable that even the human brain is able to process it and figure out what words are being said.
- euyyn 8y agoIt's not only a matter of telling "this was a whisper", but also of actually recognizing what in the world did you say in that whisper, no?
- b_tterc_p 8y agoThat is a separate problem from what the article describes.
- new_guy 8y agoAlexa never even hears me when I shout at it, nevermind whispering!
- jsight 8y agoThat is because they haven't developed shout mode yet.
- krn 8y agoAs a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in the hearts of their homes. Maybe it's the lack of shared history? I highly recommend seeing The Lives of Others (2006)[1] to those, who want to understand why Europeans take their privacy so seriously. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
- oulipo 8y agoThis is why we are building Snips at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai: create a 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice AI which will be open-sourced We did this to solve privacy issues, and empower makers!
- madhato 8y agoCell phones have microphones, are closed source, connected to the Internet and carried with you into all the rooms of your home. Europeans use cell phones so why do they fear home assistants?
- krn 8y agoCell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. Their apps are. And the user controls both, what apps he installs on his device, and what permissions he gives to them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 8y agoYou think they’re not. You really have no idea. You just have to trust that they aren’t constantly recording and sending everything back to the mothership. If you can trust that, why can’t you extend the same trust to a smart speaker?
- 8y ago
- rrobukef 8y agoThe article hasn't been published for a whole day and the link to the announcement (the first link) is already broken. Can anyone provide it? Thanks
- rrobukef 8y agoThe link works now.