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It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to inf

It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to. Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning. Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Using-Alexa-Guard-with-Alarm-to-Detect-Broken-Glass-Smoke-and-Carbon-Monoxide https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin... So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devices have relatively small amounts of RAM 3) Echo devices aren’t constantly hammering WiFi connections From this, one should be able to deduce that the wakeword engine detects events and streams clips to servers only in situations that match events and settings to support these features. Why? Because processing, transit, and storage aren’t free, and one can’t store data in RAM that isn’t there or transmit data over WiFi without the physical layer showing signs of it. Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants. Take the number of Alexa devices sold and run the numbers for all of those devices sending audio data to AWS all the time. The costs would be astronomical. The same goes for Google (though not with AWS). They’re no doubt incorporating the detectors into their on-device models.

econcon 6y ago
> Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.
- jdc 6y ago
  Nope, its high compression comes at the cost of similarly high CPU and memory usage.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Compressed audio at speech quality uses miniscule amounts of storage, especially with modern codecs like Opus.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      You addressed storage but skipped the CPU portion: Yes, Opus can create good quality audio with low storage requirements, but it cannot do so without a high CPU cost.
      - Ijumfs 6y ago
        Yet any of the smart home speakers on the market is more than capable of compressing audio.
        ineedasername 6y ago
        Look further up the thread. The bandwidth required to transport such data has not been observed. I don't think anyone would argue that these companies wouldn't have the ability to build a device that streamed everything home. It's that to do so would mean there'd be some observable effect in the device's network usage that has not been observed.
      - AsyncAwait 6y ago
        ARM CPUs can be rather performant, especially for specialist tasks. These things are always plugged in and don't need to save battery, therefore they can always run at maximum performance. The HomePod for example uses the Apple A8 chip which is a very capable chip used to power the iPhone 6 than did way more than encode/decode audio.
        fuzxi 6y ago
        Wouldn't heat generation start to become an issue? As far as I know, none of these assistants have fans. I think the average consumer would notice that their device starts giving off a lot of heat if there's a lot of speech in range of its microphone - "I wonder why my Echo turns into a space heater when I leave the TV on."
        AsyncAwait 6y ago
        > I think the average consumer would notice that their device starts giving off a lot of heat if there's a lot of speech in range of its microphone. Interesting point, my guess would be that not many would notice since a HomePod/Alexa/Google Home would usually sit somewhere in a corner of a room/under the TV and not be regularly touched since you don't need to touch it to control it most of the time. I am not even sure it would be that much heat, my x86 laptop can play video for a very long amount of time before getting noticeably hot, granted with a fan, however these ARM CPUs get noticeably less hot than your average Intel chip, even without a fan.
asfginino 6y ago
>Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants. They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their technical ability. As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at 800 KiB.
- zachm0 6y ago
  Small knit pick, but speech to text isn’t lossless. How someone says the words has a lot of impact on the meaning of those words. It’s possible Amazon doesn’t care about that lost information but that is a completely different conversation.
  - asfginino 6y ago
    That's true. Speech to text also isn't entirely accurate, which loses some information. Even when they actually do ship audio off the device for processing, I'd be surprised if it's done losslessly.
    - scollet 6y ago
      For anyone curious about this, I highly recommend developing on CMU Sphinx for a weekend project. It will really paint some pictures about machine interpretation based on training data and the actual application code.
- lotu 6y ago
  > They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text Not with the tiny cheap CPUs that are one these devices they couldn't. Or at least not very effective speech recognition.
  - MiroF 6y ago
MiroF 6y ago
Why can't they just have full on-device transcription models? It's lossy, but extremely compressed.
- jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
  Because they're cheap, low powered devices.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Even cheap devices can run transcription inference.

econcon 6y ago

> Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.

jdc 6y ago
Nope, its high compression comes at the cost of similarly high CPU and memory usage.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Compressed audio at speech quality uses miniscule amounts of storage, especially with modern codecs like Opus.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    You addressed storage but skipped the CPU portion: Yes, Opus can create good quality audio with low storage requirements, but it cannot do so without a high CPU cost.
    - Ijumfs 6y ago
      Yet any of the smart home speakers on the market is more than capable of compressing audio.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        Look further up the thread. The bandwidth required to transport such data has not been observed. I don't think anyone would argue that these companies wouldn't have the ability to build a device that streamed everything home. It's that to do so would mean there'd be some observable effect in the device's network usage that has not been observed.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      ARM CPUs can be rather performant, especially for specialist tasks. These things are always plugged in and don't need to save battery, therefore they can always run at maximum performance. The HomePod for example uses the Apple A8 chip which is a very capable chip used to power the iPhone 6 than did way more than encode/decode audio.
      - fuzxi 6y ago
        Wouldn't heat generation start to become an issue? As far as I know, none of these assistants have fans. I think the average consumer would notice that their device starts giving off a lot of heat if there's a lot of speech in range of its microphone - "I wonder why my Echo turns into a space heater when I leave the TV on."
        AsyncAwait 6y ago
        > I think the average consumer would notice that their device starts giving off a lot of heat if there's a lot of speech in range of its microphone. Interesting point, my guess would be that not many would notice since a HomePod/Alexa/Google Home would usually sit somewhere in a corner of a room/under the TV and not be regularly touched since you don't need to touch it to control it most of the time. I am not even sure it would be that much heat, my x86 laptop can play video for a very long amount of time before getting noticeably hot, granted with a fan, however these ARM CPUs get noticeably less hot than your average Intel chip, even without a fan.

asfginino 6y ago

>Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants. They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their technical ability. As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at 800 KiB.

zachm0 6y ago
Small knit pick, but speech to text isn’t lossless. How someone says the words has a lot of impact on the meaning of those words. It’s possible Amazon doesn’t care about that lost information but that is a completely different conversation.
- asfginino 6y ago
  That's true. Speech to text also isn't entirely accurate, which loses some information. Even when they actually do ship audio off the device for processing, I'd be surprised if it's done losslessly.
  - scollet 6y ago
    For anyone curious about this, I highly recommend developing on CMU Sphinx for a weekend project. It will really paint some pictures about machine interpretation based on training data and the actual application code.
lotu 6y ago
> They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text Not with the tiny cheap CPUs that are one these devices they couldn't. Or at least not very effective speech recognition.
- MiroF 6y ago

MiroF 6y ago

Why can't they just have full on-device transcription models? It's lossy, but extremely compressed.

jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
Because they're cheap, low powered devices.
- MiroF 6y ago
  Even cheap devices can run transcription inference.