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From the Privacy Policy: > The Almond app also makes use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech API to perform speech recognition. This is only activate wh
by eis 7y ago
From the Privacy Policy:
> The Almond app also makes use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech API to perform speech recognition. This is only activate when you click on the "Listen" button. ... These services are governed by their own privacy policies.
Too bad. I hoped this would have an offline speech recognition engine.
Also with all the talk about preserving privacy I find it disappointing that you have to dig through the privacy policy to see that your audio is sent to MS.
- capableweb 7y agoYeah, with that 3rd party's (and whoever else) policy, Almond is neither "Open" nor "Privacy-Preserving". The title almost seems like clickbait now. The project itself (Almost) seems very useful though and I would gladly use it if it could run locally instead.
- azinman2 7y agoCan you tell me what you found useful? None of their examples made sense to me... notify me when the nytimes adds an article? So... like constantly? Or filter on a keyword? Like I’m going to know ahead of time all the potential keywords for a given article of interest that hasn’t been written yet? And I need to know that second vs my daily news consumption during the right time?
- windexh8er 7y agoCheck out Snips [0]. My guess is they could bake this in. I think if "smart" speakers had the option for the user to control how they wanted it integrated the consumer would have much control as it would force the manufacturers to compete where it makes sense (the hardware platform) vs what Amazon and Google do today to lock people in and use their data in ways the majority of us don't want it used. [0] https://snips.ai/ https://snips.ai/
- fabrice_d 7y agoSnips was recently acquired by Sonos, so it's one less independent solution in that space.
- mehhh 7y agoSnips beibg acquired by Sonos is not the worst outcome, glad Sonos has a strategy to add their own smart assistant to their speakers rather than being beholden to large players.
- dessant 7y agoI'm doubtful that Sonos will continue to maintain all the open source projects from Snips [1]. Sonos doesn't even appear to have a public GitHub presence. They'll most likely abandon those projects and integrate the software in their devices. [1] https://github.com/snipsco https://github.com/snipsco
- windexh8er 7y agoWell, somehow I missed this and it's really disappointing. I liked Sonos' products until they had to add in smart speaker functionality. I won't buy their speakers that have a microphone and hopefully more people continually let them know that as well. At a minimum Sonos should offer a physical on/off switch to electrically disconnect any microphone. I don't trust any product in this space not to eventually do the wrong thing and collect more data than they've claimed to limit themselves to. The Sonos products seem to be changing for the worse. I think it's inevitable they're getting to the point where you won't be able to use their products unless they have a valid logged in account. It's truly frustrating all of these products that can operate without Internet phone home check-ins, yet people complacently buy them and agree to ridiculous ToS. Another one down, I guess.
- foundart 7y agoSonos recently introduced the One SL speaker, which seems similar to the Sonos One but without Alexa.
- boarnoah 7y agoWith all these Speech API's from the likes of Google, Microsoft that operate in similar ways (put data in, get data on what it thinks you said out) I wonder what the difficulty is in interacting them via common interface. That way the user could pick their poison from the choice of speech APIs, or even use a local solution. Curious if there is examples of something like this already around?