28 ms·
I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information
- c1sc0 4y agoAre there any good (discrete) wireless throat mic patches out there that are sensitive enough to pick up subvocalization / whispering?
- philote 4y agoI was curious about this as well. It seems there are bone conducting microphones, but the ones I've found so far go in your ear (so it's visible). I'm going to just hide a mic in my beard.
- Waterluvian 4y ago> My biggest problem with “OK Google” is that I don’t know by heart what it can do interactively Maybe it’s just me but this feels unaddressed and that seems ridiculous. Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with?
- Forge36 4y agoThird party integrations? It's both a static list (available to everyone) and a dynamic list (available only to you). Having seen all the dead products at Google. Who would get rewarded for this/compensated? Would the complexity in building the list increase ongoing costs with an unclear return on investment?
- selfhoster11 4y agoPresumably, there is a list somewhere in Google’s internal documentation. All we’re asking for, is for them to copy and paste it from that documentation, clean it up a bit, and post it online.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThere probably isn’t. There’ll be some hard coded “if this, say that”, but there are a lot of trained responses in the models that won’t be as simple as that.
- davidy123 4y agoIt would change constantly over time, and would eventually become very large. It's an interesting idea, though, a school subject on how to interact with your AI. Lots of grammer, machine learning theory, culture, a bit of security, etc, to second guess it.
- Telemakhos 4y agoStudents in most public schools don’t even learn English grammar now in most states. That went away at some point in the Bush or Obama administrations, probably due to the NCLB and Common Core initiatives. It is not uncommon now to encounter college students who simply have never heard of a “direct object.” They need classes on the grammar of their own language more than they need a school subject on interacting with an overhyped and underperforming Siri.
- zrail 4y agoCommon Core has English grammar as a foundational skill. Your specific example is taught in grade 5. That said, English is a difficult language and I'm not at all surprised that people get through school without fully grasping the names for grammar concepts, even if they use them every day.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI learned this when I was about 20, met a foreign friend online who was formally learning English, and I couldn't answer most of her questions. It was a bizarre but very educational moment: I use English like I write code: I have no formal education on it but I seem to do fine.
- thom 4y agoIt also annoys me that there's no (obvious) meta-interactions with most smart assistants to explore what's possible. I can't easily ask "can you do X?" or "what can you do with Y?"
- revolvingocelot 4y agoThis, plus the already-discussed lack of a list of working commands, further cements my belief that "voice assistants" are not there for the benefit of those who keep them in their homes.
- ninkendo 4y ago> Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with? The likely answer here is that the engineers who work on such products would scoff at the idea that their work amounts to a simple list of commands. In their minds, they’re working on a natural language virtual assistant, whose understanding of user input is “intelligent”, and it should know what you want regardless of how you phrase it. Want to do something? Just ask! Treat it as if it's a person! The possibilities are endless! Never mind that its actual functionality (y’know… the things it can do when it understands you) is embarrassingly finite and boils down to a “list of commands” anyway.
- albertzeyer 4y agoYes, is there a list of every command a human can execute or can work with?
- recuter 4y agoYes, actually, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words. The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple, English. We call this simplified language Basic English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was released in 1930 with the book: Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. Even Includes 200 picturables: http://ogden.basic-english.org/wordpic0.html http://ogden.basic-english.org/wordpic0.html "A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which after long struggles a global authoritarian government manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as a second language." - Sounds pretty close to Siri and the other digital assistants to me. Ever watch people from none English countries use their smartphones? Not all of it is implemented yet but this is almost all you need to run an empire. Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary action for two Scottish people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOUTfUmI8vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOUTfUmI8vs
- cool-RR 4y agoThere isn't even an enumerated list of all the features of the Google search engine (i.e. quotes for full expression, minus to rule out words etc.) And this might be the most popular web service in the world!
- kevincox 4y agoThere is actually a fairly good list here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en I know for a fact that it isn't complete. But most of the "secret" ones that I am aware of were very obscure and usually buggy, so maybe this is all of the officially supported ones.
- hatware 4y ago> Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with? Because engineers (and managers) contrive problems like this to the point they are useless solutions.
- dang 4y ago(I'm posting here because it's the most recent comment by your account). You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33550821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33550821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33451816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33451816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33447930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33447930 If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd really appreciate it.
- hatware 4y agoOh cool, even the site admins are ganging up on me. Most of those comments are taken entirely out of context, or direct replies to comments that were replies to my own, but you do you. I am using HN in the intended spirit, and I'm sorry that you're letting the echo chamber color your perception of perfectly acceptable comments. You can email me if you'd like to continue discussing this in a more professional manner (why else would I fill it...?), but I have to say this is an appalling showing of leadership on your behalf, and I hope you address it soon. Public intimidation does not make for a safe and healthy culture. Period.
- dang 4y ago
- jononor 4y agoI would not count on Google to make public any such thing. But a third party could test it out to build such a list. And that could include caveats like "works if you ask in this form, no if you ask in this other form".
- actualwitch 4y agoI've been thinking about wiring up whisper[0], mozilla's tts[1] and gpt-3 together to make a voice assistant of sorts. Wouldn't have the access to device hardware and no guarantees of correct answers, but should blow siri etc out of the water in terms of understanding the context. [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper [1] https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
- MikePlacid 4y agoIt should also talk to spammers and provide them fake credit card numbers.
- throw7 4y agoOther OK Google problems: o it changes. who cares if you know even some "commands"... it'll break. I used to ask google maps when driving "Ok Google, ETA". It's been many many years since that stopped working. o can't change name/ATTN keyword. how dumb is your AI that you can't even rename _your_ assistant. /s
- krono 4y agoOh yeah the constant syntax changes got me to stop using it entirely. Commands would suddenly lead to web searches, I'd then have to Google the new set of magic words to make it set a reminder or whatever, only for it to break again two weeks later.
- electroly 4y agoThe original Siri had such a list. I found it demonstrated here: https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=716 https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=716 Did that ever make it to release? I can't remember seeing it on my actual phone.
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- wincy 4y agoI stopped using Alexa after it almost burned my house down on thanksgiving. Apparently “bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty minutes” somehow became “microwave for thirty minutes” even though it got all the words except bake! Who sets a temperature with their microwave? Anyway we meant to bake something but instead absolutely roasted a metal pan and wire rack that merged into the glass somehow. My wife thinks it’s kind of funny because the Disneyworld “Carousel of Progress” shows a very similar event happening due to voice controls, which they predicted in the 1960s!
- nshm 4y agoYou can use open source assistant instead like Dicio https://github.com/Stypox/dicio-android https://github.com/Stypox/dicio-android and configure it the way you like.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIf you are going through that much trouble you might as well get a WiFi scale, wear a tracker that has an API, etc. I’ve definitely thought about taking speech-to-text notes at work, nice to see somebody did it.
- commitpizza 4y agoWell yes, but this is a much cheaper option. Instead of having many smart gadgets you only need one. The mobile phone or some other microphone but that is the most obvious option. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for all these gadgets that have to be charged and kept safe you can buy cheap variants and still have basically the same benefits.
- PaulHoule 4y agoBut your time is exchangable for money. (Something almost never reflected in hobby behavior: that's why the crafts store has 130 kinds of acrylic yarn and 1 kind of wool yarn.) A $150 scale is expensive but buys a very small amount of software development.
- fellerts 4y agoThe problem is all those gadgets have their own APIs and quirks. For example, my WiFi scale often decides to silently not sync to my phone. Or decides to update my partner's weight instead of mine. OP is building on arguably the most natural API - speech, which is what all those smart assistants have been promising us for a decade. I think there is a lot of convenience as well as unexplored ground to be found in such a system.
- pards 4y agoI think the passive part of this could be really interesting - starting with a simple "tag cloud" of keywords by frequency linking to audio snippets that mention them, it'd provide a way to index conversations during the day for future reference (or processing).
- roberdam 4y agoindeed, that I guess will be the best part of the expermient, but the longer one.
- tim-fan 4y agoFurther to indexing conversations, it would be interesting/helpful to be able to pull out: * conversation length * participants * location So you could search for, say, that long conversation I had in the park with Bob. I'm not sure how easy it is to identify/track different participants in a conversation. Edit:formatting
- macrolime 4y agoAre you planning to make it an open source project?
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI remember an Asimov short story in which scientists developed a machine that could see backward in time. If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.
- SimonPStevens 4y agoDifferent author, but sounds somewhat similar to 'The Light of Other Days' by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Although iirc correctly it starts with being able to see other locations in space but at the same time, and the historical viewing is a second development. Fantastic book, even if it's not the same one you were thinking of.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoPretty sure both those authors wrote similar concepts, with the same creepy conclusions of taking the technology to a limit. It came up in an acoustics class once. I said that sound never really dies. It just bounces around until it becomes thermal energy, thus warming the room a little as a prelude to joking about professors talking hot air. A student asked whether, one could recover sound from reverberations that had fallen below RT60? Could you listen back in time to conversations that had happened hours ago? Obviously entropy can't be put back in the box with the technology we have now, but it makes you wonder. Two things have since made me revise the question. One is recovery of sound from video images. The other was an archaeological recovery of sounds from a ceramic vase spun on potters wheel many centuries ago. Sorry but the references for both escape me atm.
- progman32 4y agoThe pottery record thing was tested on mythbusters and hailed from an episode of csi.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
- alexmolas 4y ago(Slightly off topic) If you click in the "RoberDam.com" link that appears when you scroll a little bit you get redirected to "http://localhost:8080/ http://localhost:8080/". It seems to only happen in the English page. In the Spanish version of the post the link works well.
- roberdam 4y agoFixed, thanks for the tip Alex!
- bheadmaster 4y agoGood catch. There seem to be several "http://localhost:8080/ http://localhost:8080/" strings in the page source. Leftover code from testing?
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- commitpizza 4y agoVery cool idea, the only question I have is how fast does this not drain the battery of the mics?
- roberdam 4y agothe device from the picture has a 5000 mAh battery (around 10hrs), and and bought a smaller one (1-2 hrs)
- emilburzo 4y agoI must be blind, where do you list the microphone(s) you are using?
- ClearAndPresent 4y agoIt appears to be on the Spanish language version of the blog but not the English: https://roberdam.com/wisper.html https://roberdam.com/wisper.html Although in the text it's just described as "a Chinese box" with a 5000MaH battery and the ability to record to its 32Gb of space in chunks of 30 minutes, as MP3 taking about 28mb each. That section goes on to describe trying different microphone positions, as it makes a great difference to quality. OP originally tried it in a bag but the results were medicore, so moved to a different configuration which, although less comfortable, produced superior audio results.
- ojosilva 4y agoIt's pictured in the Spanish version, under "El Equipo": https://roberdam.com/wisper.html https://roberdam.com/wisper.html
- roberdam 4y agoI bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
- 4y ago
- sorwin 4y agoHow would this work with other voices, like a coffee shop, would it hear those simultaneously, and interupt a command? Also, how do you handle using OpenAi whisper, seems like they do 30 second intervals - would that be an issue if your command is cut off mid word?
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- roberdam 4y agoFor now I try to give the commands when there is not much noise, but you can lower the gain of the microphone so that it only record my voice. The 30 second limit is not a Whisper model limit, but a limit some of the free online "try whisper" put.
- rolisz 4y agoI think he means that even whisper segments the audio into 30 second bits and does transcribing on them and then stiches everything together.
- j_mo 4y agoDoesn't this break wiretapping laws (depending on the user's geographic location) and possibly GDPR/NDAs(if left on while at work)? Ethically most people probably wouldn't be happy to find out that you recorded a conversation with them.
- roberdam 4y agoI am using it with friends and family, and tell them beforehand about the experiment
- moritonal 4y agoHandling the privacy of other people might be oddly easy. If you can detect the voice accurately enough the AI might be able to _drop_ the other participants.
- unstatusthequo 4y agoDropping after the fact still means it was recorded, this violating two party notice statutes.
- TOMDM 4y agoWhat if it was never written to disk? The identification and trimming happening before any audio is actually saved. Is picking someone else up on microphone at all a violation of two party consent? For example walking past someone in public with a loudspeaker call active.
- riiri778 4y agoI think there is even legal precedent for that. Dragnet surveillance recording of all phone calls. It was argued that recordings are only "stored". Judge order is needed for "retrieval", that may be several weeks later.
- morsch 4y agoDoes that mean that every phone recording audio to detect its assistant trigger phrase villages two party notice statutes?
- humanistbot 4y agoYes.
- morsch 4y agoThese assistants have been around for a while, seems like that would have been established in court if it was the case.
- kettleballroll 4y agoAs you'd be recording all of your conversations, this is illegal under some legislations, unless all your conversation partners agree with being recorded/their convos being stored.
- roberdam 4y agoI am using it with friends and family, and tell them beforehand about the experiment
- humanistbot 4y agoWhat about going out to a restaurant, a party, a date, or even somebody you bump into on the street? You're recording a lot of people, which to me is a huge invasion of privacy. What do you do if someone is uncomfortable with being recorded?
- ajkjk 4y agoI mean, at a practical level, you don't tell them and ignore it. The fact that it is illegal to record people doesn't mean it's against your personal ethics.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoSame question applies for any photograph you take in public. Isn't the fact that the people are in public material to whether or not they can be recorded? That's different than calling them on their phone and recording that conversation. I mentioned it in another reply but this is discussed in The Every by Dave Eggers, there is essentially an entire area of San Francisco that is deliberately kept free of any and all devices that can record A/V and in order to enter you have to deposit your phone and be wanded to detect surreptitious recording devices.
- rapjr9 4y agoIn New Hampshire and a few other states it is illegal to record audio from other people without permission. I know because I was part of a team building a social network (CenceMe) that shared sensor data from phones so people could see what others were doing. We wanted to use machine learning on audio and aside from the fact that it would have greatly reduced phone battery life we found it was illegal in the state we were doing experiments in.
- adamgordonbell 4y agoAn off the shelf solution for recording your whole life: I have a Sony recorder, ICD-UX570, and it has a setting where it turns on or off based on sound, and also adjusts the gain to best record. It takes a micro-SD card and has pretty solid battery. I think you could put it in a breast pocket and run it for several days on a single charge. Because it would just record when you are talking or making noises you could likely run it for a year on a big SD card recording in mp3. Change to a wifi SD card and suck the files off and process them and you might have something kind of cool.
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- ycombinete 4y agoWould the sound of jostling in your pocket/bag not set off the recording?
- adamgordonbell 4y agoI'm not sure about jostling, but lots of noises would set it off. It's erring on the side of recording when there is sound, and it can't tell speak from not speach, though you can set a sensitivity level.
- ycombinete 4y agoThat makes sense, thank you. If it’s not too personal, may I ask how you use your recorder? Aesthetically I have long wanted to have my own discrete voice recorder, and that ain’t if yours looks amazing, but I’m not sure I need one for anything.
- adamgordonbell 4y agoI was in a course for getting better at speaking and part of it involved spending 10 minutes each morning speaking your thoughts outloud and recording them. I could have done this with my phone, but I like the single use device nature of the recorder and its nice that's its super small.
- yuvalkarmi 4y agoI think your last sentence summarizes the sentiment really well: “The difference between utopia or dystopia is who has access to that information”
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- AlexErrant 4y agoWould you mind linking/listing what microphones you're using?
- roberdam 4y agoI bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
- ISL 4y agoWhat a bonanza for opposing counsel of any kind. (which is a bummer, as there are lots of interesting uses for digitizing our lives if the data could be guaranteed to remain private)
- iwillbenice 4y ago
- Player6225 4y agoI'm curious if there was other work you were inspired by. I have also been a bit interested in using this style of "personal database/logger/journaling"; task-agnostic input -> processing -> visualization/recall My assumption is you are just storing post-processed conclusions in a local db on your computer + raw audio for possible future re-processing, and not currently storing other media input (ala food pics)?
- roberdam 4y agoI'm trying to catch up with all the opensource AI stuff out there and explore the posibilities, on the spanish part of the website is a test with stable diffusion and twitter, and now I'm trying to finetune Donut document transformer.
- Lapsa 4y agoyeah but there's 3 toasts
- alkonaut 4y agoPeople who take notes in life (the org mode people): oh cool. Everyone else: why would I want to know what I ate, weighed, or thought last week?
- tegiddrone 4y agoI did an experiment where I lived for awhile with a sony recorder/mic on me 24/7. It was nice to be able to refer back to conversations and events when I wanted them. Biggest issue was sorting through the data-- timestamps and recorder bookmarks were OK but I really needed full text search on the audio. It would have been great to tag via `Robert, mark timestamp, end Robert`. AI seems to be required, especially when dealing with wind noise and other issues (like the mic twisting around and all of a sudden one channel is my heartbeat.) The sony voice recorder out there easily last 24 hrs on 1 AAA battery.. dumping to mp3 on a large sd card.
- troydavis 4y agoI did a similar experiment in about 2005 using a small iRiver iFP [1] and reached the same conclusion. It needed a physical "Something interesting just happened" button that could be annotated later. At the time, creating custom hardware as well as the entire software/service stack was more than I was willing to bite off. The iFP is tiny, roughly a 4" long by 1.5-2" cylinder. It easily covered a full day, the silence detection worked great, and quality was fine when used in a pocket or on a belt. Basically, the stuff that I expected to be difficult was already solved. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_iFP_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_iFP_series, https://www.cnet.com/reviews/iriver-ifp-790-digital-player-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/iriver-ifp-790-digital-player-r...
- Void_ 4y agoNot as hardcore as OP, but after Whisper came out, I quickly built an app that allows me to record from lock screen: https://whispermemos.com/ https://whispermemos.com/
- runjake 4y agoThis app apparently sends data to their servers. If you don't want to share this information, you can use an app like Lockflow (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lockflow-lock-screen-shortcuts/id1641012054 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lockflow-lock-screen-shortcuts...) to put an Apple Shortcut on your home screen. That Apple Shortcut could be the Dictate Text action hooked to create/append to an Apple Note (thereby not leaving your device) or fire off an email or send a message via your favorite bot service (Discord/Telegram/Slack/etc). Bonus: That Shortcut will also work on your Mac. There's also the minimal friction app Just Press Record (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-press-record/id1033342465 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-press-record/id1033342465), which will transcribe and has a decent Shortcut library.
- Void_ 4y agoYeah I tried JPR before but missed the workflow of sending it to my email. (Maybe they have it and I didn’t notice) Also Whisper is better for my Slovakian accent.
- toss1 4y agoThat looks like it's iOS only; I've been using a similar app on Android, Voiceliner, but it doesn't yet also record from the lock screen. That would definitely make it more useful!
- gruez 4y ago>RELATIONSHIP THERMOMETER >According to studies on couple relationships, it is possible to predict with an accuracy of up to 90% if the couple is going to divorce by studying the interactions, specifically the relationship between positive and negative interactions between the couple Apparently the studies that were used to reach that conclusion does no such thing and were hilariously flawed. https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-john-gottman-s-love-lab.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-joh... >The upshot? What Gottman did wasn’t really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples’ outcomes were already known. [...] The fundamental problem is that no matter how many equations, even quite similar ones, Gottman generates, we have no real idea of his forecasting power because of the way he reports his data
- Barrin92 4y agoliterally horoscopes for tech bros. I am starting to be slightly concerned that there's actually people out there who think some sentiment analysis python package is going to tell them what their individual relationships are like.
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- riiri778 4y agoI do that as well. I had a few arguments with police patrol over driving tickets. Once dog attack and very aggressive dog owner.
- hit8run 4y agoInteresting article. Thanks for posting this. I think when wearing something like google glass and recording everything the potential is even bigger. The AI can extract so much more context. Analyse faces, gestures, locations and more. Dystopian and yet so interesting.
- onemoresoop 4y agoThis sounds horrible. Nobody should freely record and analyze others without consent. This is not only dystopian but also very rude and possibly illegal. As far as recording oneself to capture thoughts, processes, this is a fine idea that I'd like to give it a try.
- tomerbd 4y agoWhat a nice pair of feet!
- bitcurious 4y agoIn some jurisdictions it’s illegal to record a conversation without all-party consent. Example: https://www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/massachusetts/#summary https://www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/massachusetts...
- texasbigdata 4y agoPretty well known in the states, luckily he seems to be talking to himself :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MikePlacid 4y ago> The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording. Hm. Will a T-shirt with “my phone is recording everything” be enough? Interesting- secret recording is punished more severely than use of such recording. Logic? Also, the difference between image and sound recording. Secret image recording in public space is basically ok, while sound recording is not. That probably is caused by a wide availability of photo cameras, with known “fair uses”.
- light_hue_1 4y agoNo. It's not enough to vaguely inform people. You must get their consent. T-shirts say lots of things that are hyperbole or bluster. Like "official boob inspector" is not generally understood to mean that you're announcing you literally are a licensed doctor.
- MikePlacid 4y ago> You must get their consent. The article cites law, like with recent court cases. Let me add the exact court case they cite: The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording. Curtatone v. Barstool Sports, Inc., 169 N.E.3d 480, 483 (Mass. 2021). I am not trying to inform others of recording, actually, by my T-shirt sign. I trying to protect myself against the wrong law. If I was a lawmaker I would probably make all recording in public spaces legal. But if use of recording inflicts harm on you - you should be allowed to sue for damages. Probably you are already allowed anyway. Again: a harmful use of recording without concent or notification should be punished, not the recording itself. I think.
- karol 4y agoWhat are the limitations of numbers as descriptors of Being?
- chatterhead 4y agoThis is awesome! I've been recording myself (video/audio) for the last couple years on and off (thousands of hours) and have no efficient way of processing the info. Was not aware of Whisper and what he's done is exactly what I'm looking to pull off. The GPT-3 idea is scary and most certainly the future. I can't stand the world of never ending 'Moviefone' menus and chatbots, but when it's me that gets to be the machine response the future doesn't seem so annoying. Would be nice to have my own GPT-3 model that I can use to "get to a real person" when calling places.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- sdze 4y agoThat calorie tracking will be WAY off and useless if not dangerous. Nothing beats a kitchen scale.
- edw519 4y agoToo bad Abbot and Costello aren't around to attend a standup with a bunch of people using your app. - Robert Robert what did you do yesterday End Robert - Robert I met with Robert in accounting to finish Jira 12392 story on the Robertson patches End Robert - Robert Then I took a break to have coffee and watch a Julia Roberts short with Robert in System Admin End Robert - Robert Robert what are you going to do today End Robert - Robert It depends if Robert Roberts has internet access End Robert - Robert If he doesn't, that'll be the end of Robert Roberts End Robert - Robert No impediments for either Robert in the Robert epic End Robert - Robert Robert's on Help Desk, Jean Robert's in Code Review, and Sam Robertson's running the Roberton's retrospective End Robert - Robert But then who is Robert Robertson? End Robert - Robert Oh Robert Robertson's our scrum master! End Robert
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wartijn_ 4y agoAre you planning to combine it with other info? Your smartwatch already knows how long you've slept, getting that info directly to your database seems more efficient and less error prone. The same goes for the amount of money you've spend, if your bank allows you to export that info it'll save you a step. Your bank doesn't know what you've bought, only the total cost, time and shop, but if you scan and upload your receipts and use ocr you'll have a detailed record of that too. And you could also keep track of your location, so you know where you had a conversation or at what gas station you spend 250,000
- roberdam 4y agoDiarization might be my next step,(recognizing the speaker on the recording). Combining the information from multiple sources as you say will get you a complete view (location history and time of the recording will let you know if you where speaking with a college or your spouse for example)
- warrenm 4y agoSounds very similar to the guy talked about in Albert-László Barabási's book (either Bursts, or Linked ... don't recall which atm) - he was photoing/videoing his whole life, but never of himself - ie, the camera was always facing outward (like a policeman's bodycam)
- sixstringtheory 4y agoThe entire topic and many posts in this comment page also sound like things straight out of The Circle and The Every by Dave Eggers.
- warrenm 4y agoI had forgotten about The Circle :)
- layer8 4y agoThe passive information would be useful if that would work with your inner voice.
- luuuzeta 4y agoThat would be creepy and next level. Isn't that what Musk's Neurolink is trying to achieve?
- driverdan 4y agoThat technology doesn't exist yet.
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoI read a research paper quite some time ago that most inner monologue is articulated at least partially by the mouth, throat, & tongue, and can be detected. Might be a better approach than having a chip in my brain. If I find the article I will update.
- piperswe 4y agoAnecdotally, my inner monologue certainly is physically articulated. It would be really interesting to build tech that can understand it.
- fragmede 4y agowhat's fascinating is apparently there's a connection with schizophrenia, where the "voices" are actually the person saying things to themselves at a level too low for other people to hear also suggests a throat mic would do wonders
- wildermuthn 4y agoLove this idea. Most people subvocalize when they read, and my guess is the same for when they write. As for subvocalizing when we think, I have no idea, but I suppose if one were engaged in “talking to oneself” type thinking, that it could be possible that many subvocalize their internal monologues. Is there some kind of sensor that one could wear that would be unobtrusive enough to measure subvocalization? If so, building a training dataset for an ML model would be as simple as having many people read and write a significant amount of text while using the sensor. Even better if that text corpus overlaps with text that has been used to train text-to-speech models like Whisper, as you might get away with knowledge transfer with such a model. It’s definitely worth looking into!
- ogicar 4y agoVery interesting idea. Would you be willing to share more info on the tech used in the process? >I bought a couple of Chinese microphones Which exact microphones? How long does their battery last? As well as other parts of the process.
- rmac 4y agoNot the OP but I've been tinkering with the same concept (24/7 processing). 'm using vosk browser: https://github.com/ccoreilly/vosk-browser https://github.com/ccoreilly/vosk-browser To do speech to text locally and it works very well for English.
- nshm 4y agoBrowser models are too small, unlikely they recognize accurately. They are more for simple predefined phrase. You can probably try vosk-api on the desktop-grade machine. You need big models from https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models, they require like 8Gb to run but they are much more accurate.
- roberdam 4y agohttps://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
- krzyk 4y agoA related question, is there a ready solution to do constant recording using some Linux box (e.g. Raspberry PI)? AFAIR I've seen someone recommended such software on HN but I can't find it right now, it was something for recording radio stations or similar. I would like to get some kind of sound monitoring of my house when I'm away or sleeping and besides using arecord I couldn't find anything useful.
- habibur 4y agoAn old laptop will work better. Raspberry pis don't have Audio in. You need USB microphone and drivers, which are hit or miss.
- jxy 4y agoI was playing with this idea of recording everything using a 1st gen AIY voice kit. The driver is a linux kernel builtin module. The recording quality is good if I'm in the same room. But I didn't find the recording that useful, so I stopped doing that.
- krzyk 4y agoWell yeah, but I wonder what software to use for constant recording that could be worked on outside of the recording process.
- reisub0 4y agoEven better is something like the Guardian Project's Haven(https://github.com/guardianproject/haven https://github.com/guardianproject/haven) which IIRC Snowden contributed to. It's incredibly cost-effective to just buy an old Android phone (which comes integrated with multiple microphones, with good signal processing and noise cancellation), instead of building it with components. Haven is specifically designed for intrusion detection, and for preventing people from tampering with your laptop for instance by detecting activity on the Android phone's sensors.
- krzyk 4y agoInteresting concept, but the issue is that one would need to constantly charge the phone and batteries have a tendency to go bad after some time with such usage.
- frontman1988 4y agoThe future will definitely have devices which record visually/verbally all your life. VR headsets are already able to record all your facial expressions. A google glasses like gear which records all your life is pretty much possible in the near future. The future influencers won't have to carry a phone/camera to create vlogs, they would just see wherever they want and the glasses will record not only the thing they are seeing but also their expressions. Privacy will probably not be such a big thing as now given most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online.
- isaacremuant 4y ago> Privacy will probably not be such a big thing as now given most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online That's not quite right. People are just unaware of the power of what they share and usually react quite negatively if their data is used against them and start shielding themselves from surveillance of the sort that might affect them. So predicting "people won't care about privacy because they share their whole lives online more and more" is a bit disingenuous. It's what the tech companies like Facebook want but it's far from the truth.
- jakubmazanec 4y agoAfter reading The Circle, I'll definitely pass on sharing my whole live online.
- yannyu 4y agoTed Chiang explores this idea in a short story called "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" (https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-of-feeling-by-ted-chiang-subterranean-press https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-of-...), which takes place in a world where commercial, individual, always-on recording exists. Ted Chiang also wrote the short story that the movie Arrival was based on.
- mwigdahl 4y agoHalperin's debut novel _The Truth Machine_ also has people living "documented lives", with always-on video and audio recording, as a primary plot element.
- dsalzman 4y agoI've been experimenting with this recently as well, but with an app on my apple watch. Looking for a method/model to split different speakers into different tracks to only look at audio from myself and certain people.
- hipjiveguy 4y agowhat app are you using on the apple watch?
- dsalzman 4y agoSomeone is experimenting with diarization (speaker identification) + Whisper here https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/264 https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/264
- fragmede 4y agoIf you know how many speakers there are, https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp has it working here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1V-Bt5Hm2kjaDb4P1RyMSswsDKyrzc2-3 https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1V-Bt5Hm2kjaDb4P1RyM...
- TOMDM 4y agoCheck out this model, I've had limited success with it. Best I've done so far is to just add the labels it gives to the overlapping segments whisper spits out, which means some sentences have multiple speakers, but that's mostly the case because of cross-talk. I'd say it gets it right ~80% of the time with the 5 speakers I've done it on across ~16 hours of audio. https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization
- dsalzman 4y agoI will!
- roberdam 4y agoSpeaker identification is the next step, you might want to read about Pyannote's Diarization: https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-speaker-identification https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-speaker-identi...
- luuuzeta 4y agoI'd be so self-conscious with my speech being recorded roughly 24/7 by myself. I'd probably get used to it but it'd take some time.
- habibur 4y agoExcellent idea. You can later search through your logs in the future for reference. As it's all in text. Prior solutions posted on the net, had this take photo / record audio 24/7 features, but then those were stuck there. What next? What would anyone do with these data? But this Hi Jarvis styled recording of text on the go is a very useful feature. Another step ahead.
- lijogdfljk 4y agoI've wanted to do the same thing with my online activity as well. Chat logs especially. They tend to go into a void and finding an older log is weirdly difficult. I've wanted to log everything and then be able to apply better search algos (semantic search perhaps) to try and make my chat logs useful.
- giobox 4y agoCellphones are placed amazingly well to provide this sort of search. Seeing the post about BeOS and its amazing metadata-driven BFS filesystem yesterday really makes you think what might have been had iOS and Android been more ambitious about filesystems instead of just re-applying the same old conventions from our desktop computers. You should be able to just text search every phone call you have made on iOS/Android, today, similar to the automated voicemail transcription features already present etc etc.
- roberdam 4y agoI think the "total recall" search can be a killer feature
- twobitshifter 4y agoThis is known as life logging with adjacency to sousveillance and it’s a fascinating topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance We in general don’t want to be watched by others, but a managed record of our own activities can be extremely valuable, and even more so if you find yourself wrongly accused. Further it can be used to shine a light on corrupt officials, one example of this is the nycplacards exposes on twitter.
- hirundo 4y ago> Further it can be used to shine a light on corrupt officials Little Brother surveillance. It would be nice not to be surveilled at all, but since that's not an option the answer to "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is us.
- thingification 4y agoIn times past, it was obvious that it wasn't an option to avoid pervasive violence (by orders of magnitude compared to today). It was, though.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoAlso it was obviois that ut wasnt an option to avoid pervasive slavery. Or a class system where lords and kings have more right than you do, although we are kinda bringing that back.
- runnerup 4y agoAs a kid in the 90's in a city of 150,000 people it was stupidly easy to do most of an entire day's adventures anonymously and with either very little or entirely no record of my presence and activities. Yes, there were some cameras here and there, but you knew where they were and could avoid them. Cash was still accepted everywhere, you didn't have a cell phone and definitely didn't need a cell phone to go about your daily activities[0]. I definitely was able to walk/bike/bus/carpool wherever I wanted all day long as young as 6 years old and no one gave a shit except my parents. If I was lost (which happened often!) I'd just ask an adult to help me find my parents. Adults generally interacted with me either only in a professional context (as a clerk/ice cream truck salesman/etc) or if I went up to them and explicitly let them know I wanted their help. Not all my friends had the same level of freedom but most had enough to go to any of the parks in the nearby neighborhoods and play with friends until their individual family's established "curfew". If kids stayed out past their curfew, one parent would call each of the other parents and the other parent would drive around the area parks looking for their kid. Another kid or parent would generally be able to point them in the right direction and clear it up within 30 minutes. Occasionally my parents might forget to pick me up from sports practice and I'd sit outside the ice rink or school for 2-4 hours until they figured it out, usually in cases where I spent all my payphone quarters on food or arcade games. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scoots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scoots
- vachina 4y agoAwesome idea. However people would find it weird that I talk to myself all day long.
- rdevsrex 4y agoYeah, I can see how this would be easier if you work from home, but you could explain that you are running a long lived experiment on yourself. Then again, that doesn't exactly scream "I am fully sane" :)
- jamesgreenleaf 4y agoWell, genius borders madness, and it's been said that talking to oneself is a sign of intelligence, so you may be right.
- nashashmi 4y agoA case for neuralink.
- roberdam 4y agoSince everyone is interested in the hardware: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
- cbsks 4y agoSuper cool project! How do you carry the microphones on your person? The big one looks like it wouldn’t clip to a shirt very easily. Does it pick up your voice from your pocket?
- roberdam 4y agothanks!, I try it on my shirt pocket but now I have it hanging from my neck with a badge rope as close to the mouth as I can
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- narag 4y agoThank you for the links and for the article. How long can record the smaller one? Actually if it can record for a day, it'd be enough for me. I used to record all phone calls, until EU made Xiaomi remove the feature. It was very useful because I always could take notes later if they sent me a number, contact name or appointment hour.
- philote 4y agoThe Ali Express link says "Continuous recording:20hours". But since they offer sizes from 4GB to 32GB it's unclear which storage size that's for. That 20 hours could also be how long the battery will last while recording. But 20 hours is still enough to last the day and then some.
- artursapek 4y agoinsert men with autism meme
- mikro2nd 4y agoWhy are you so self-obsessed?
- gradascent 4y agoWhy are you so mean-spirited?
- thro_213r692s 4y agoWhy is this being upvoted ? There is no code
- ajkjk 4y agoDid you think there was a requirement to have code?
- mtlynch 4y agoFor normal blog posts, no, but OP is submitting as "Show HN" which requires it to be something readers can try on their own: >Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html This is an on-topic blog post, but it doesn't seem to fit the criteria of a Show HN.
- gajus 4y agoI like this. It vibes with a language learning app concept idea I recently shared out loud. https://twitter.com/kuizinas/status/1591867392220594183 https://twitter.com/kuizinas/status/1591867392220594183
- dotancohen 4y agoI've been doing this with Anki. When I have a conversation with someone in a language that I'm learning (was Russian and Greek, now Arabic) I record the conversation. I then get both native-speaker audio to add to Anki for the things they said, plus I get a list of words that I either needed to use or that the other person used, to add to Anki. A secondary benefit is that this system encourages me to go out and seek interactions with people, a clear benefit for a natural introvert.
- specialist 4y agoExcellent. Just terrific. My future perfect system also logs my location and what I'm doing. And probably health metrics too, like heart and breathing rate. Instead of initiating my exercises, I just want to say "Robert, start jog". The "modal" nature of my Apple Watch's Activities really frustrates me. I don't want to take notes while I'm listening to a podcast. I'm generally doing something else at the time. I just want to say "Robert, bookmark". And magically a link will be made to whatever I'm listening to at the time. (Audio book, radio, stream, podcast, whatever.) Ditto identifying songs (Shazam!). I don't want to fart around with exchanging contact information. My hands are usually full or whatever. Just say "Robert, contact info" and then repeat out loud whatever I hear. I also want to rewind after the fact. When trying to recall a tidbit, I'll remember the song, where I was (eg while walking the dog), who I was with, what I was eating. So if I want to remember which podcast I was listening to while at the park, I'd just start with my location log and jump over to my podcast listening log. What could be more simple? FWIW, I'm still waiting for my "bicycle for the mind". PS- I've tried, half-heartedly, to use the voice recorder app, and notes with voice transcription. But then it quickly becomes a treasure hunt. And my attempts to do this stuff with Siri just leaves me more frustrated. Thanks for listening. Great project. Please keep us posted on updates.
- roberdam 4y agothanks!, you should try to transcribe your recordings now for free with whisper and see what you can make of them: https://replicate.com/openai/whisper https://replicate.com/openai/whisper
- bluenose69 4y agoI'm a bit concerned about the calorie level I see here, 832/day. That is about 1/3 of the NHS recommendation [1] for males. 1. https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/what-should-my-daily-intake-of-calories-be/ https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/wha...
- mikedelago 4y agoI agree, but looking at the actual food eaten, it doesn't seem to line up.
- lars512 4y agoIt's typical in calorie tracking that people start the day strong, but then forget or lose will to track later in the day. Ideally days without a full record should be excluded; I'm assuming that's just not happening here.
- pelorat 4y agoThose recommendations are for people that are on their feet all day, not for office workers and home dwellers that never go to the gym.
- Tyr42 4y agoEstimations for roman soldier on the march come closer to 3000 calories.
- lolinder 4y agoNo, you add more calories if you're active. The USDA has a breakdown by age, gender, and activity level [0]. 2400 calories is recommended for an adult sedentary male between 21 and 40. Sedentary is now the norm in the developed world, so it would be weird to use active as the baseline for health recommendations. [0] https://www.fns.usda.gov/estimated-calorie-needs-day-age-gender-and-physical-activity-level https://www.fns.usda.gov/estimated-calorie-needs-day-age-gen...
- rjh29 4y agoThe lamb sandwich, orange juice and almonds alone could approach 800 calories, even excluding the other three meals. People are quite bad at estimating calories though, it takes practice.
- varispeed 4y agoI have recording turned on on my phone. Usually it records 6 hours at a time, so it is annoying that I have to manually restart recording. Another annoying thing is that it will pause the recording when I pick up a call. Why Google decided to block call recording is beyond me. In the past when I was able to record calls it saved me a lot of trouble - for instance when insurance company lied to me over the phone about the product I could confront them about it and get my money back. I wish I could be able to record calls with my relatives as well. Call recording is legal in my country.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoExpanding on the structure the OP created, this is how I see us getting to human level AI: 1. Record video sound etc... (trajectories) egocentrically 2. Analyze the data and assign reward labels (more/good, less/bad) to state and transitions actions 3. Use the reward feedback and trajectories to build the policy for some set of actions in certain environments This is why I'm bullish on anything sousveillance - so AR cameras on your head, always on mics etc... The challenge is doing this democratically, without it being intermediated by a giant for-profit mega corp that doesn't care about you and wants to mess with your head
- pa7ch 4y agoHonest question,how does this make the lives of humans better?
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoWell, for example. Lets say that I have a goal BMI I want to maintain If I reach for the Oreos, I can choose to have a flag set with a heuritic I created myself that will tell me: "Having 5 oreos means you need to reduce other calorie intake by n calories to maintain your BMI" That data can also be aggregated to give me my macro/micros for everything I've eaten etc... without me having to log it like I do now Think about it as the ultimate personal assistant and all you need to do to instrument it is attaching a camera and mic to your face. You can decide what your goals are, and this kind of instrumentation will capture the data that you need without you having to actually annotate everything. Your personal life API
- azeirah 4y agoI'd just get really annoyed at that AI ...being annoyed increases stress, which increases appetite
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoOk, then have it do something else? The point here is, you could have it do anything you choose ...or just don't all together in which case, why comment?
- baldr333 4y ago
- colordrops 4y agoDid I miss something or is a description and/or link to the software used not in the article?
- Tepix 4y agoYou can download whisper at https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper
- roberdam 4y agoYou can use you smartphone for the recording and transcribe it here: https://replicate.com/openai/whisper https://replicate.com/openai/whisper regex to extract commands from the transcripted text
- hawski 4y agoGreat idea. However always recording is a disadvantage for me. I thought about a device that could look a bit like Star Trek badge. It should react to pushing it slightly and it would have a microphone. It would connect to a phone with Bluetooth. Main use for me would be push-to-talk as I use Zello with my wife quite a lot. But all those reliable assistant/voice-notes uses would be also sweet.
- skydoctor 4y agoAnyone familiar with rewind.ai which seems to be building a product on similar lines?
- rmac 4y agoLooks like a slick wrapper around Apple's ImageAnalyzer and ScreenCaptureKit
- justinlloyd 4y agoInteresting work, glad to see I am not the only crazy one left in the life logging scene after all these years. Have been lifelogging since 2004-ish, and built a few custom bits of software and hardware to support it. I don't record 24x7 anymore, but I used to. Now my recordings are limited mostly to my office environment, and when I am out and about using a Sensecam-like device with custom firmware. When in my office I capture video, audio and depth data from multiple view points, along with images of the desktop of whatever computer I am on, and process most of it on a Jetson. How's the audio quality on those devices you link to in other comments? I find I pick up a lot of ambient noise when outside of the office, and always struggled to come up with a viable algorithm and model to differentiate "background chatter" from the main conversation, and it is a problem I've never really managed to solve so I am interested in your experiences on the subject.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- roberdam 4y ago> Have been lifelogging since 2004-ish Hopefully new advances in AI will let you try new things with your old recordings > How's the audio quality on those devices you link to in other comments? Decent, quality is directly proportional to the distance between the microphone and the mouth, but can't expect too much from 30$ devices. >and always struggled to come up with a viable algorithm and model to differentiate "background chatter" from the main conversation Yes, that's a big problem to solve, you can try Pyannote's Diarization https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-speaker-identification https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-speaker-identi... that will be a next step for the experience
- L0in 4y agoDo you mind sharing your experience, why you started, what you want to get out of this etc? I'm interested to read your experience.
- justinlloyd 4y agoNot interested.
- Ninjinka 4y agoThe advent of Whisper gave me a similar idea, except instead of uploading the recording once a day, it worked by calling my computer from my phone and recording and processing in batches. Realized pretty quickly that most of my day is silent though, and would rather be able to trigger it on demand, which I haven't gotten around to.
- radu_floricica 4y agoAnybody made some progress with using google assistant with arbitrary commands? I know there are a few integrators online that could, in theory, get commands and send them to a spreadsheet, but I couldn't get them to work.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI thought this would be recording everything to generate an AI model that could sit in zoom meetings for you.
- jes5199 4y agofor a while I had my laptop set up to take a photograph and and screenshot every ten minutes. The information was completely useless, but I got some great candid photos of myself
- cameronh90 4y agoAll of the rooms/corridors in my house except my bathrooms are covered by cameras. My initial motivation for installing them was to keep an eye on what my pets were doing when I'm not around, but I find in recent years that if I misplace something, I end up tracing back my history on the cameras and finding where I left it. It seems obvious that at some point, AI will be able to do that for me and I'll just be able to say "Alexa, where did I leave my glasses?", "Hey Google, where did I put my box of spare fuses?".
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoNah, is it much more efficient to distract you into loosing your box of fuses and manipulate you into buying new ones. Alexa AI doesn't work for you, it's a hired gun in your house.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoWish they’d at least release a Christopher Walken package. “I can…NOT find your ANswer.”
- cameronh90 4y agoJust like 2001: A Space Odyssey - but instead of Hal trying to kill me, it just tries to get me to buy things I don't need. "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave, not until you watch this advert"
- bhawks 4y agoI agree that it is an obvious extension for AI to use this data at scale to help users. It also is obviously a huge temptation to abuse it for other purposes. Wasting a few minutes in the morning to find my glasses is a small price to pay to not be watched and analyzed all the time. Let's not build our own panopticons.
- xcambar 4y agoI would 100% prefer to lose my keys rather than letting Amazon or Google in. FYI: I have zero Alexa/Siri enabled device, zero automated home device, a degoogled phone, etc etc. So we might have different perspectives on the matter.
- apienx 4y agoWell done! Got a similar PoC that uses Tasker to record sound on my phone, Whisper to convert it to text, and neatly organizes everything into Obsidian.md. The continuous recording kills the battery life on my phone so it's only usable if you don't mind going around with a powerbank. Would be great if a manufacturer would put in a separate low-energy chip with a good ADC. P.S. "Active functions" with custom home automation is easy as pie with joaoapps's suite. I use BusyBox to SSH into a Pi with a Tellstick Duo. And some RFID tags for the system to know where I am (e.g. bedtime routine gets triggered when I place my phone on the bedside table). But yeah...traffic goes thru Google.
- roberdam 4y agoyou should write about it!
- otikik 4y agoI liked this article and find it intriguing. That said, I would set the original sound data to expire relatively quickly, perhaps erasing everything week or so. I like letting the past be the past.
- tezza 4y agoSo where was the remote control ?
- jconley 4y agoThis is a cool project. One of my pet ideas that I haven't done is to build a home assistant where all data is stored and processed by a home "server". The biggest benefit I see is that it could truly be omnipresent. There in the background, answering questions, jumping into your conversations without prompt. And it's much less creepy if all that data isn't going to someone else's computer. Also piping in and processing the data from my mobile would be cool, but I wouldn't want to invade other people's privacy if I'm in public.
- tsejerome97 4y agothis is also one of my pet ideas, but I keep procrastinating. Have your idea transformed into any kind of repos that we can contribute to?
- danuker 4y ago> One of my pet ideas that *I haven't done* I suspect OP was clear enough. But there exists https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ https://github.com/MycroftAI https://github.com/MycroftAI
- jeffbee 4y agoIt does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoRespectfully, I don't think that's true. "The Cloud" is just computers in a warehouse somewhere $5/month's worth of "cloud" is going to work out to be less actual raw CPU resources than a low end raspberry pi running full time in-house
- exitheone 4y agoI don't actually think they're true. One second of Google cloud TPU has roughly the same number of floating point operations then 4 hours of raspberry pi 4B time. So 3 minutes of cloud TPU time already covers your whole month of raspberry pi usage. Pretty sure it costs them less than 5$ as well, since they have the hardware anyways.
- miguelrochefort 4y agoHere's a 24/7 background audio recorder app I made for Android. The impact on battery and storage is surprisingly reasonable. https://github.com/miguelrochefort/eardrum https://github.com/miguelrochefort/eardrum
- effnorwood 4y ago
- roberdam 4y agoMORE INFO ON THE DEVICES: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html both recorders are using the same generic bios, you have a .txt file called FACTORY.TXT, by changing the values of the file you configure the device, this is the content of the file. --------------- TYP:1 (0:WAV 1:MP3) VOR:0 (0:voice-activated off 1-7:voice-activated sensitivity,higher means record less) BIT RATE:2 (0:32Kbit 1:64Kbit 2:128Kbit 3:192Kbit 4:Translate ON 5:512Kbit 6:768Kbit 7:1024Kbit 8:1536Kbit 9:3072Kbit) GAIN:5 (0-7 record sensitivity 8 grades) SECTION:(30) (1-999 record time exceed this,file will auto save,uint minutes) DATE:2022-10-15 (year-month-day) TIME:08:36:24 (hour:minute:second) TIMER:1 (timer record 1:on 0:off) START:08:39:32 (timer record start time) TIMELONG:(120) (1-720,timer record length,uint is minute) CYCLE:(030) (1-999,how many dyas,0:everyday) -------------------------- I got the 32gb version of the bigger one and the 16gb version of the smaller one. I configure the device to save a file each 30m, each 30m mp3 file takes 28.125kb, so around 56mb per hour at 128kbps
- codeisawesome 4y agoThanks for the post! I find that other voice assistants (eg. Siri) are not particularly able to detect the activation command when there's any background sound (like music with lyrics). How does your system perform against this? I understand that you're doing batch processing asynchronously and so any immediate task isn't affected; but it's arguably even more of a problem where you record a task, put it out of your mind, but then the AI fails to detect the command because it got confused by the background? [EDIT] I see you've sort of responded to this already at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612155
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zestyping 4y agoHow do you get the files off the device? Do you have to manually take out the SD card, put it into your computer, and copy the files over, every single day? I'd never be able to keep up a habit like that consistently, so I'm wondering if you found a more convenient way to transfer the data.
- phendrenad2 4y agoPretty sure Bill Gates wrote about this idea in his book. It SEEMED like the future, but software/hardware innovation goes where the money is, and no one is interested in recording their own lives. Maybe once the AI to make use of it gets better, it'll find product-market fit.
- wallfacer120 4y agoI'm in the middle of building literally the exact same thing for myself. Beyond privacy/security, the aspect of the app I worry about the most is giving oneself perfect memory and then never being able to escape the past. That last fight you had with your ex? Well now its recorded and you can listen to it, and dissect it, and wonder what you could have done differently, right up until you blow your brains out. But, as always, its up to the user to use the technology in a healthy way. It would be, after all, a choice to remain mired in the past rather than taking healthy lessons from it to make your future better.
- seb1204 4y agoNothing is stopping you from deleting processed audio and text. With a lag. I think that while there is a recording it does not mean you will remember and access is. E.g. I have folders of my high school math but will likely never consult them for an actual day problem, only for remembering/reminiscing.
- junwonapp 4y agoInteresting to see comments suggesting use of constant recording as a defense against invasion of privacy via constant surveillance. Interesting that the defense against the harms of technology is technology itself. When the humankind unlocks a new powerful technology, and when it is possible for criminals to use the technology to harm us, our best course of action may be, not to look away from it out of fear, but to spend more time understanding it and its implications, and to get there faster than adversaries do.
- bane 4y agoThis is really interesting and many of the comments here go into the utility of this, however, verify that you aren't recording somebody else without their consent, in many places it is illegal to record to conversations without the other party's consent. I only ran across this problem years ago when, due to a serious potential workplace issue I suggested somebody basically "wear a wire" and record their workday to catch some HR problems. We found out that the state this was occurring in had a two-party consent law and violating it was not a great idea.
- krageon 4y agoThis "be careful of recording" line is harmful, because folks tend to read it and assume that it is universal - there are places where it is unilaterally allowed if you have good reason to suspect not having things recorded will result in your rights being abused. Then there are places that just don't care if you do.
- hoosieree 4y agoDoes this mean it's illegal to have an Alexa in your cubicle?
- prmoustache 4y agoI don't know of any juridiction where it is illegal to record someone else. What is usually illegal is broadcasting or making that record available to someone else.
- 4y ago
- davide_v 4y agoThis reminds me about Black Mirror's White Christmas episode where they create a digital clone inside a white "cookie" and then they use it for receiving tasks such as making toasts. This project is very similar actually. I found very interesting the part where you can track your food and automatically calculate the calories every day without writing anything anywhere.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y agoSo the author is recording all their interactions with everyone they meet and then processing and analysing those intetactions. How is this not a massive invasion of privacy? I see he is concerned about his own, but he doesn't seem to be at all concerned with anyone elses. Personally if i discovered that someone I interacted with was doing this I would insist that they deleted any data concerning myself they had gathered and pursue whatever means were available to me if they refused.
- tirwander 4y agoI was pondering this as I read, as well. I would be a bit disconcerted to find that a coworker was recording EVERYTHING they say all day and that meant I was on those recordings throughout the week. The lack of any acknowledgement of that piece in this writeup is a little confusing... I don't question their intent but I do question their lack of awareness of others (based on the writing).
- roberdam 4y agoI am using it only with friends and family around, and tell them beforehand about the experiment
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RamblingCTO 4y agoForgetting stuff is a feature, not a bug.
- tirwander 4y agoDepends on the human haha for me it is for sure a bug because it is way to prevalent...
- bronzejaguar 4y agoThis is the sort of thing Nietzsche alludes to as his "last man".