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I think people assume that the (amazon/google/apple) microphones are continuously uploading audio to the cloud. Wake word detection on these devices would be te
by stingrae 6y ago
I think people assume that the (amazon/google/apple) microphones are continuously uploading audio to the cloud. Wake word detection on these devices would be terrible/expensive if it ran in the cloud.
- agentdrtran 6y agoThis is correct, and yet it's still a microphone. My Google Homes and my iPad with Siri listening will trigger accidentally pretty frequently.
- stingrae 6y agook, but it's not even close to continuous capture. Also Google/Apple/Amazon are trying to cut it to 0 accidental triggers because it is a pretty poor UX. edit for clarification: continuous capture to the cloud
- alexbanks 6y agoHow would you trigger a device with a sound without continuous capture?
- Phillipharryt 6y agoThey have chips in them only looking to match the activation words, which then passes the rest of the request functionality to the full device.
- alexbanks 6y agoSo the company that repeatedly does bad things, and continually gets exposed as doing more bad things, tells you they're not doing a bad thing, you believe them?
- low_key 6y agoI think they mean it isn't continuously transmitting the data to Amazon/Google/etc. The device does continuously monitor (capture) audio, but the detection is done locally and data is only transmitted to the respective service after the keyword match. This is reasonable as long as you trust that the device is performing as designed (and that the design doesn't include any undesired behaviors).
- jtriangle 6y ago> Data is only transferred The privacy concern is that it'd be trivial for someone to use amazon's firmware keys to sign a new firmware and flash the device remotely that would indeed make it upload continuously. Normally that'd be far fetched, but, with Amazon's connections to intelligence agencies, it's more of a valid threat than it appears on its face. Such a thing would be trivial to detect with proper network monitoring because an audio stream is pretty simple to trigger an alert on, but, almost nobody is doing that because typically if you're worried about something like that you're not going to buy a device like this.
- floatingatoll 6y agoYour usage of the word 'trivial' appears to be a substitute for the word 'conceivable', and I would absolutely agree that's it conceivable with this specific rewording in place: > it'd be conceivable for someone to use amazon's firmware keys to sign a new firmware However, I disagree with the word 'trivial' and the framing it implies. It would require a non-trivial amount of effort for Amazon to do this; both to keep it secret within Amazon; and to build, sign, and ship a custom firmware; and to avoid detection by changes in the device's bandwidth patterns.
- takeda 6y agoA lot of people are forgetting that those companies have full control over what the wake word is or how the wake word mechanism works and can change it remotely.
- alexbanks 6y agoI guess, based on all that we know about BigTech, is there any reason to actually think they're behaving this way? And if they are now, they'll continue to?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- coryfklein 6y agoInstead they can be continuously recording and selectively uploading.
- takeda 6y agoThere was an article recently about Google service notifying owner that the batteries in smoke detector need to be replaced (based on the chirp sound noises the smoke detector does). This shows that at very least the "wake word" can be easily changed. I think that anyone installing device like that without having a complete control over it is just ignorant. And this is surprising, since many tech people don't see any problems with it.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoThis seems like such a useful feature though. I wish there was a way to know for certain exactly what the device was doing so I could have this functionality but also have certainty that Google can’t arbitrarily add other wake words without my knowledge or consent.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoMy understanding is that the word detection takes place on the device and text transcripts are uploaded to the cloud.
- Crespyl 6y agoI'm pretty sure the speech recognition for those transcripts happens in the cloud (necessitating that the raw audio be uploaded), unless the devices have gotten substantially better since I last looked.