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Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in Real-Time, even when offline
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 7y agoAn interesting angle to this: if your phone is powerful enough to transcribe audio in real time without any external processing, and considering how cheap it is to transfer and store text, how long before autocratic countries start persisting everything you say ?
- pacala 7y agoPersisting is benign. Actively processing, less so. Imagine stack-ranking party alignment sentiment, based on everything the subjects ever said.
- the_duke 7y agoThe processing part was implied. My point was just: with audio, you might want to think about really recording, storing and processing everything. But if a phone can do high quality transcriptions and just send them off to government data centers, it becomes sort of a no brainer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dzhiurgis 7y agoBefore or how long time ago, every countries do that? I wish mere mortals could have access to this. Having an easily searchable logs of what was said on calls would solve trillions in contract and court disputes. Many people already use this with third party apps, especially on Android.
- propogandist 7y agoon a somewhat related note, I've discovered that youtube is somehow exfiltrating conversations I have during the day, to tailor content on my YT feed.. There does not seem to be any one app responsible for the data exfil, so I've been led to believe they're building models (or transcribing text locally) and sending it up whenever android phones home (constantly). I've tried attempting to block data exfiltration (Netguard etc) but nothing seemed to have worked and I had to switch devices. If they're able to do on-device transcriptions and the tech is mature enough that they're going to release it as a standalone product with a big launch, I can now believe they have some similar tech running on devices to support their core-metrics (engagement w/ YT content, which drives Ad revenue). Play close attention to your YT video feeds and you may notice the behavior I've observed too.
- lonelappde 7y agoHave you considered that this traffic is impossible to detect or block because... it doesn't exist?
- propogandist 7y agothere's traffic that gets through services like netguard that's calling home to services like mtalk.google.com and google play. This traffic comes up when doing router level DNS & traffic monitoring. this has also been observed on an AOSP device that does not have Gapps installed.
- copperx 7y agoI'm not going to say it's not technically possible, because it is (although it would be a huge battery or bandwidth drain, not to mention an insane tech scandal if found to be true); but if the only proof you have is a video feed that resembles your conversations I'm going to guess you're giving that data to Google is some other way. There are a thousand ways this could be happening, and most them have a psychological component.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gundmc 7y agoLoving the trend towards federated on-device ML. The more data that stays on-device rather than going to Google/whoever's cloud the better.
- m463 7y agoI would't put it past the cloud providers to ALSO snarf up the transcript (and possibly the raw audio to help with training). It might even be a cost savings.
- jrpt 7y agoIf they're federating the ML, they can also do federated learning. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning) Although in most cases I suspect it's probably not federated learning, instead just a deployed model that they've trained with in house data.
- OrgNet 7y agoso, where can I download the app for a different phone? I'd like to record to text my day on a phone that has no internet. I can't see it on the "play" store
- pkaye 7y agoI think it needs a special AI accelerator chip which is first coming in the Pixel 4 phones.
- HaloZero 7y agoso the chances of it on the iPhone are slim then :(
- dzhiurgis 7y agoApple would more likely to remove every single feature from iPhone before allowing something like that on phone calls.
- m463 7y agoI thought apple already had ML functions like this for facial unlock. They also used to provide transcripts of voicemail done locally on the phone (although it was not great accuracy)
- gen3 7y agoThey also use ML for "Hey Siri" and the face detection in the photos app. Edit: Here is the article where apple talks about how "Hey Siri" works: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
- jjeaff 7y agoYou mean before allowing someone else to do it? You almost sound like you think apple cares about privacy any more than it serves their financial interests at the moment.
- jakeogh 7y agoGoogle: totally not an APT
- m-p-3 7y agoAlso available on APKMirror https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-recorder/ https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-recorder/