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>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording

>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded, and for that keylog to be accessible to the manufacturer of the keyboard, their employees, and their contractors.

microcolonel 8y ago
> Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the same.
- MereInterest 8y ago
  The type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy. - Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event, setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to - Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results. In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Totally agree. The raw audio shouldn't be sent back or at a minimum not stored.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      The speech recognition is running remotely, only wakeword recognition is local on most of the devices.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Which is really a problem that needs to be solved. Just because it's cheaper to do something in the cloud, doesn't mean it should be done in the cloud.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        IMO, it's cheaper and (importantly) better to do it in the cloud. Better in there's steady improvement to customer experience with zero customer interaction, a cleaner developer "apps" marketplace, and each local device can be smaller, cheaper, and lower power.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Except that fully local tasks now cannot be done fully locally, more data than needed for the task is leaked to the service provider, and the whole thing becomes a centralized ordeal. It turns into a single service what should be a product giving access to mulitple services. It offers degraded user experience due to latency (reason #1 I don't use voice assistants, #2 being not much useful to be done with them if I can't trivially write code gluing them with stuff I have in my house), stops working completely when there's not Internet connection (Internet isn't and can never be as reliable as power), and I'm doubtful of how significant power benefits are once you account for the power that's used by various routers to transmit your voice to the cloud and get the results back.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Power and cost benefits from the perspective of the end user. I have a device that draws under 10W that is (as far as I'm concerned) capable of world-class and ever-improving voice recognition and interaction. That a service provider or set of service providers are providing me temporary use of kilowatts of computing computing power that I don't ever see a bill for is irrelevant from the perspective of "is it worth me paying $40 and $5 of electricity per year to have a tiny voice assistant?" vs "is it worth me paying $500 and $75/year in power for a fully local, larger, and inferior solution?" It's unsurprising to me that the market evolved towards the former as the latter would almost surely be a commercial failure.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > The audio can be parsed locally Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to just "run locally". Device-local recognition is limited, and not very agile. It often takes years for it to recognize new words, and it usually has extreme bias toward a handful of urban centres. I don't like sending my data away, and I choose not to, but it is simply not realistic to expect Google-quality or Amazon-quality continuous real time speech recognition and nlp to happen entirely on-device.
    - stordoff 8y ago
      > Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to just "run locally" Why not? It _could_: > In our recent paper, "Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition for Mobile Devices", we present a model trained using RNN transducer (RNN-T) technology that is compact enough to reside on a phone. This means no more network latency or spottiness — the new recognizer is always available, even when you are offline. [...] > The RNN-T we trained offers the same accuracy as the traditional server-based models https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...
      - macawfish 8y ago
        This is really cool!
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > Why not? It _could_: It did. Anyone remembers the good ol' Microsoft Speech API of ~Windows 2000/XP era?
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      You can already run an offline google translate that will not only recognize your words but translate it to a foreign language.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - 8y ago
kgwxd 8y ago
Gboard has an agreement similar to that.
- MereInterest 8y ago
  Wow. Here I thought I was following the logic to something that would universal be agreed upon as being absurd. I wonder if that would be a new variation of Poe's Law: "There is no invasion of privacy so great that Google will not have a product utilizing it."

microcolonel 8y ago

> Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the same.

MereInterest 8y ago
The type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy. - Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event, setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to - Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results. In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Totally agree. The raw audio shouldn't be sent back or at a minimum not stored.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    The speech recognition is running remotely, only wakeword recognition is local on most of the devices.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Which is really a problem that needs to be solved. Just because it's cheaper to do something in the cloud, doesn't mean it should be done in the cloud.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        IMO, it's cheaper and (importantly) better to do it in the cloud. Better in there's steady improvement to customer experience with zero customer interaction, a cleaner developer "apps" marketplace, and each local device can be smaller, cheaper, and lower power.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Except that fully local tasks now cannot be done fully locally, more data than needed for the task is leaked to the service provider, and the whole thing becomes a centralized ordeal. It turns into a single service what should be a product giving access to mulitple services. It offers degraded user experience due to latency (reason #1 I don't use voice assistants, #2 being not much useful to be done with them if I can't trivially write code gluing them with stuff I have in my house), stops working completely when there's not Internet connection (Internet isn't and can never be as reliable as power), and I'm doubtful of how significant power benefits are once you account for the power that's used by various routers to transmit your voice to the cloud and get the results back.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Power and cost benefits from the perspective of the end user. I have a device that draws under 10W that is (as far as I'm concerned) capable of world-class and ever-improving voice recognition and interaction. That a service provider or set of service providers are providing me temporary use of kilowatts of computing computing power that I don't ever see a bill for is irrelevant from the perspective of "is it worth me paying $40 and $5 of electricity per year to have a tiny voice assistant?" vs "is it worth me paying $500 and $75/year in power for a fully local, larger, and inferior solution?" It's unsurprising to me that the market evolved towards the former as the latter would almost surely be a commercial failure.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > The audio can be parsed locally Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to just "run locally". Device-local recognition is limited, and not very agile. It often takes years for it to recognize new words, and it usually has extreme bias toward a handful of urban centres. I don't like sending my data away, and I choose not to, but it is simply not realistic to expect Google-quality or Amazon-quality continuous real time speech recognition and nlp to happen entirely on-device.
  - stordoff 8y ago
    > Speech recognition doesn't work like that, there's no yacc/lex for you to just "run locally" Why not? It _could_: > In our recent paper, "Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition for Mobile Devices", we present a model trained using RNN transducer (RNN-T) technology that is compact enough to reside on a phone. This means no more network latency or spottiness — the new recognizer is always available, even when you are offline. [...] > The RNN-T we trained offers the same accuracy as the traditional server-based models https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...
    - macawfish 8y ago
      This is really cool!
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > Why not? It _could_: It did. Anyone remembers the good ol' Microsoft Speech API of ~Windows 2000/XP era?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    You can already run an offline google translate that will not only recognize your words but translate it to a foreign language.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8y ago

kgwxd 8y ago

Gboard has an agreement similar to that.

MereInterest 8y ago
Wow. Here I thought I was following the logic to something that would universal be agreed upon as being absurd. I wonder if that would be a new variation of Poe's Law: "There is no invasion of privacy so great that Google will not have a product utilizing it."