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> - company surreptitiously builds a profile on everything it hears, ostensibly for "training" their ML / AI I have yet to see any evidence that any voice-comm

> - company surreptitiously builds a profile on everything it hears, ostensibly for "training" their ML / AI I have yet to see any evidence that any voice-command device is transmitting everything it hears. The data sent by the device is too small to contain audio beyond what was said after the wake word was detected. The hardware does not have the necessary chips to do 24x7 voice to text. You're totally right that they can do a lot with what they do get, from the audio around when you say the wake word, and from other data that you give them through web surfing, location data, etc., and that's totally a legitimate reason to not have one or to limit one's interaction.

fsflover 5y ago
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/dont-murder-anyone-around-an-echo-during-election-season.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/dont-murder-anyone-ar...
- treesknees 5y ago
  As your article states, the wake word (and those phonetically similar to it) may activate the voice recording. But the device isn't recording audio 24/7. Presumably other voice assistants like Siri and Google have made advancements in activation hardware/software/algorithms in the 4 years since that article came out.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    You never know when it could wake up, so you should assume that it can listen at any time.
zdragnar 5y ago
Maybe it's just my accent, but whenever I'm around someone else's device (Alexa most recently) wakes up multiple times and responds to something we didn't say. The worst part is, when we tell it to stop (potentially flagging it as incorrect), how do we know that conversation isn't being analyzed to "improve" the model? We never used the wake word, so we don't know how long it was listening. It's hard for me to think of them as anything other than creepy. I want to like them; I like the idea of being able to have the convenience of vocal interactions with technology. But, until I'm convinced that it is entirely on my own terms, that's not going to happen.

fsflover 5y ago

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/dont-murder-anyone-around-an-echo-during-election-season.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/dont-murder-anyone-ar...

treesknees 5y ago
As your article states, the wake word (and those phonetically similar to it) may activate the voice recording. But the device isn't recording audio 24/7. Presumably other voice assistants like Siri and Google have made advancements in activation hardware/software/algorithms in the 4 years since that article came out.
- fsflover 5y ago
  You never know when it could wake up, so you should assume that it can listen at any time.

zdragnar 5y ago

Maybe it's just my accent, but whenever I'm around someone else's device (Alexa most recently) wakes up multiple times and responds to something we didn't say. The worst part is, when we tell it to stop (potentially flagging it as incorrect), how do we know that conversation isn't being analyzed to "improve" the model? We never used the wake word, so we don't know how long it was listening. It's hard for me to think of them as anything other than creepy. I want to like them; I like the idea of being able to have the convenience of vocal interactions with technology. But, until I'm convinced that it is entirely on my own terms, that's not going to happen.