4 ms·

Is this honestly surprising to any developer? How can you develop a product like Siri/OK Google without being able look closely at edge cases? And if you have t

Is this honestly surprising to any developer? How can you develop a product like Siri/OK Google without being able look closely at edge cases? And if you have to record conversations to troubleshoot even extremely rare edge cases, you still end up with a system that allows this eavesdropping.

stefan_ 7y ago
You recruit people for testing and obtain their informed consent? What do people here think how say medicine or research is developed?!
- dzader 7y ago
  thats because medical research has real effects on people, someone listening to you ask google to the turn the lights on doesn't matter. at all. (save the omg well they might hear something important - no they wont, and no the person on the other end doesn't give a shit even if they do)
  - burkaman 7y ago
    https://www.wired.com/2017/02/murder-case-tests-alexas-devotion-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/murder-case-tests-alexas-devot...
- xondono 7y ago
  Like paying for them? How is a multibillion dollar company like google supposed to pay such a large amount of money... Think of the children! (of the shareholders)
- thfuran 7y ago
  I think medical software works on pretty much exactly model the parent comment describes, where software developers commonly have access to (anonymized) patient data and less commonly and less readily to unanonymized patient data.
  - davesmith1983 7y ago
    I worked for a year with Patient Medical Data in the NHS in the UK. Typically it is as simple as script to replace patient names after downloading a live backup. You then delete the backup of the DB that has the real names. That is pretty much it.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  And now you don't have broad coverage of accents.
RHSeeger 7y ago
The same way people debug things like web pages and applications that don't call home. You get reports of issues, you reproduce it locally, and you fix it.
watwut 7y ago
I work on software without having access to customers data. Where I can access them, it is with their consent and NDA signed. Wtf. Of course software can be made without listening to private data of customers.
mherdeg 7y ago
Well, you could get your test data from paid participants who consent to constant whole-home recording. Like the "Nielsen Families" of old. This would be worse data than just using all available inputs to train your model, but it's an alternative. There are alternatives to storing all input data for later training; they likely produce worse models and cost more, but they are available.

stefan_ 7y ago

You recruit people for testing and obtain their informed consent? What do people here think how say medicine or research is developed?!

dzader 7y ago
thats because medical research has real effects on people, someone listening to you ask google to the turn the lights on doesn't matter. at all. (save the omg well they might hear something important - no they wont, and no the person on the other end doesn't give a shit even if they do)
- burkaman 7y ago
  https://www.wired.com/2017/02/murder-case-tests-alexas-devotion-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/murder-case-tests-alexas-devot...
xondono 7y ago
Like paying for them? How is a multibillion dollar company like google supposed to pay such a large amount of money... Think of the children! (of the shareholders)
thfuran 7y ago
I think medical software works on pretty much exactly model the parent comment describes, where software developers commonly have access to (anonymized) patient data and less commonly and less readily to unanonymized patient data.
- davesmith1983 7y ago
  I worked for a year with Patient Medical Data in the NHS in the UK. Typically it is as simple as script to replace patient names after downloading a live backup. You then delete the backup of the DB that has the real names. That is pretty much it.
UncleMeat 7y ago
And now you don't have broad coverage of accents.

RHSeeger 7y ago

The same way people debug things like web pages and applications that don't call home. You get reports of issues, you reproduce it locally, and you fix it.

watwut 7y ago

I work on software without having access to customers data. Where I can access them, it is with their consent and NDA signed. Wtf. Of course software can be made without listening to private data of customers.

mherdeg 7y ago

Well, you could get your test data from paid participants who consent to constant whole-home recording. Like the "Nielsen Families" of old. This would be worse data than just using all available inputs to train your model, but it's an alternative. There are alternatives to storing all input data for later training; they likely produce worse models and cost more, but they are available.