3 ms·

Why would you need voice? Just translate to text and send that. It’d be a very very small payload.

• teraflop 8y ago
  The Alexa hardware is cheap and doesn't have a lot of computational horsepower, so you can get better accuracy by doing the speech recognition on the server side.
• oh-kumudo 8y ago
  The Alexa device itself is rather cheap and the running a relative huge model on 'edge' device is still fairly expensive and remains an open question. Again it falls into economic side of things, it makes sense to adapt a layered model in this case, to delay more expensive processing to the server side.
• kabdib 8y ago
  A defense lawyer would have a ton of fun poking holes in the accuracy of speech-to-text, especially on a small device. (You could easily determine if the device is doing this kind of processing by looking at power draw or thermals. This stuff takes a lot of crunch). Amazon isn't stupid. They know that if a back-door is found in these devices, or if they have bugs that allow them to be compromised, that they are toast in the market. I'd be surprised if they didn't have internal briefs and a bunch of planning on many scenarios like this. Amazon has almost certainly made the most secure device it can, knowing it will be under intense scrutiny, and will have prepped its legal teams appropriately.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    My phone, a several-year-old Moto G, a middling phone even when new, does a decent job at text to speech without noticable thermal or power issues. And I don't have mobile data so it can't be that it's offloading it to a server.