4 ms·

I am curious if they have been silently saving voice to text transcription in the background on all calls and if AI will be permitted to ingest all of that data

I am curious if they have been silently saving voice to text transcription in the background on all calls and if AI will be permitted to ingest all of that data. A great deal could be learned from private one on one calls in the corporate world. The insider knowledge one could gain about corporations and governments would be fascinating.

naillo 3y ago
Their mouths must be watering at this thought but the legal repercussions are obviously company destroying
- j45 3y ago
  It wouldn’t be surprising. Gotta make sure audio is clear on calls. How? We run randomly less random speech to text to make sure words are being said. Which words? Well if any are on this list of words we might think have to tell someone.
musha68k 3y ago
I feel as if 2023 could become the inflection point where we will finally start investing in our own infrastructure again. Video calls for example are really a commodity service to be set up at this point.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Where I work they have been running in-house video meeting infrastructure for close to 20 years. They abandonded all the equipment and expertiese a few years ago in favor of Zoom. For all its faults, it's just so much easier for users. They probably saved 10 or more minutes per meeting of "Can you hear me? Can you see us? Can you see my screen?" BS at the start of each meeting. I guess it also helps that these days most people are working with phones or laptops that have integrated and well supported cameras and microphones, vs. then when that stuff would have been external peripherals and required installation of the proper drivers.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Odds of any company spending the millions of dollars required to do that poorly, let alone going the extra distance to do it right: about zero.
  - musha68k 3y ago
    I don’t know, we might be closer to quality of service parity than we think. Even without taking into account “costs” of blatant privacy disregard / violation, data theft, potential industrial espionage, etc. If the tools continue to get better at the current rate; then the SREs you have to hire anyways will probably be able to deliver about equal results (while staying in control of the data). I’m thinking about those GPU “coops” we heard about emerging, shared between SV startups. And then think about what Oxide are doing. Then binding all of those trends together through the promise of Kubernetes and its inherent complexity finally getting realized / becoming “worth it” at some point. Multi cluster, multi region - multi office attached server rooms across CO’s locations? Everything old could be new again. Wireguard enabled service meshes, Cluster API, etc. We will get there at some point probably sooner than later. Then you “just install” the fault tolerant Jitsi helm chart across that infra… with all the usual caveats of maintenance taken into account of course. Again hassles will be reduced on all fronts and SREs needed anyways. I do lots of terraform and k8s in my day job but at this point I deem any work that isn’t directly related to k8s as some kind of semi (at best) vendor specific dead weight knowledge. Kind of why I’d never would want to be knowledgeable about browser quirks - I hate how much I know about these proprietary cloud APIs. I know some people who work on Kubernetes for “real-time” 5G back-ending if you can believe it. Lots of on-prem there on the cellular provider sides etc. We are getting really close already.
    - TheRealPomax 3y ago
      You're not going up against "how hard is it to roll your own", you're going up against "how inconvenient is it compared to Zoom". You can spend millions to make something that works but unless it's as good as Zoom is (and that's going to cost you a few million to develop from scratch, even with off-the-shelf FOSS components, and FAR more if you're hiring experts to write it scratch) your CEO should, and I stress *absolutely should* (because their responsibility is to shareholders, not to employees) go "how is this better than zoom, and why are we not using that instead so we can put that money in our own wallet?".
hammock 3y ago
Isn't that what "Customer Content" is?
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  It is, though I suspect there may be some expectation that voice-to-text transcription only occurs when one clicks a button to make it so.
  - hammock 3y ago
    I just like how everyone is up in arms over the use of your meetings for AI training specifically, when the ToS clearly says all "Customer Content/Customer Input" AKA your words, text, voice, face, etc can be used for "Product and Services Development" which could as easily be a facial recognition database, a corporate espionage service, a direct competitor to whatever company you work for, or literally anything else before it's an AI lol.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 3y ago
It's quite common for corporate/government contracts to have totally different terms that prohibit any kind of AI training (or recording/access at all). This has been the case for years now. Precisely because of the risks you highlight. In these cases, companies train on content stored/transmitted in the free/individual consumer version only.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  That's good to know. Assuming government employees are not meeting with anyone that is using personal or corporate accounts contractors, vendors they should be at less risk of AI blackmailing them or selling secrets to opposing nations. Everyone else will just need to be extra careful what they say in the event that the AI accidentally leaks something.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

naillo 3y ago

Their mouths must be watering at this thought but the legal repercussions are obviously company destroying

j45 3y ago
It wouldn’t be surprising. Gotta make sure audio is clear on calls. How? We run randomly less random speech to text to make sure words are being said. Which words? Well if any are on this list of words we might think have to tell someone.

musha68k 3y ago

I feel as if 2023 could become the inflection point where we will finally start investing in our own infrastructure again. Video calls for example are really a commodity service to be set up at this point.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Where I work they have been running in-house video meeting infrastructure for close to 20 years. They abandonded all the equipment and expertiese a few years ago in favor of Zoom. For all its faults, it's just so much easier for users. They probably saved 10 or more minutes per meeting of "Can you hear me? Can you see us? Can you see my screen?" BS at the start of each meeting. I guess it also helps that these days most people are working with phones or laptops that have integrated and well supported cameras and microphones, vs. then when that stuff would have been external peripherals and required installation of the proper drivers.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Odds of any company spending the millions of dollars required to do that poorly, let alone going the extra distance to do it right: about zero.
- musha68k 3y ago
  I don’t know, we might be closer to quality of service parity than we think. Even without taking into account “costs” of blatant privacy disregard / violation, data theft, potential industrial espionage, etc. If the tools continue to get better at the current rate; then the SREs you have to hire anyways will probably be able to deliver about equal results (while staying in control of the data). I’m thinking about those GPU “coops” we heard about emerging, shared between SV startups. And then think about what Oxide are doing. Then binding all of those trends together through the promise of Kubernetes and its inherent complexity finally getting realized / becoming “worth it” at some point. Multi cluster, multi region - multi office attached server rooms across CO’s locations? Everything old could be new again. Wireguard enabled service meshes, Cluster API, etc. We will get there at some point probably sooner than later. Then you “just install” the fault tolerant Jitsi helm chart across that infra… with all the usual caveats of maintenance taken into account of course. Again hassles will be reduced on all fronts and SREs needed anyways. I do lots of terraform and k8s in my day job but at this point I deem any work that isn’t directly related to k8s as some kind of semi (at best) vendor specific dead weight knowledge. Kind of why I’d never would want to be knowledgeable about browser quirks - I hate how much I know about these proprietary cloud APIs. I know some people who work on Kubernetes for “real-time” 5G back-ending if you can believe it. Lots of on-prem there on the cellular provider sides etc. We are getting really close already.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    You're not going up against "how hard is it to roll your own", you're going up against "how inconvenient is it compared to Zoom". You can spend millions to make something that works but unless it's as good as Zoom is (and that's going to cost you a few million to develop from scratch, even with off-the-shelf FOSS components, and FAR more if you're hiring experts to write it scratch) your CEO should, and I stress *absolutely should* (because their responsibility is to shareholders, not to employees) go "how is this better than zoom, and why are we not using that instead so we can put that money in our own wallet?".

hammock 3y ago

Isn't that what "Customer Content" is?

LinuxBender 3y ago
It is, though I suspect there may be some expectation that voice-to-text transcription only occurs when one clicks a button to make it so.
- hammock 3y ago
  I just like how everyone is up in arms over the use of your meetings for AI training specifically, when the ToS clearly says all "Customer Content/Customer Input" AKA your words, text, voice, face, etc can be used for "Product and Services Development" which could as easily be a facial recognition database, a corporate espionage service, a direct competitor to whatever company you work for, or literally anything else before it's an AI lol.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

crazygringo 3y ago

It's quite common for corporate/government contracts to have totally different terms that prohibit any kind of AI training (or recording/access at all). This has been the case for years now. Precisely because of the risks you highlight. In these cases, companies train on content stored/transmitted in the free/individual consumer version only.

LinuxBender 3y ago
That's good to know. Assuming government employees are not meeting with anyone that is using personal or corporate accounts contractors, vendors they should be at less risk of AI blackmailing them or selling secrets to opposing nations. Everyone else will just need to be extra careful what they say in the event that the AI accidentally leaks something.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]