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Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to cloud
- ffhhj 2y agoWe should make AI generated conversations to overload their surveillance.
- ohgr 2y agoI imagine an Alexa customer would have a net loss financially from the model execution costs if they just sent garbage all day. Doesn’t even need to be clever.
- lenerdenator 2y agoJust play SpongeBob extra loud elsewhere in the house.
- airstrike 2y agoNot if you run it locally and power it with solar?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoWaste of time. Find something else constructive to do.
- ffhhj 2y agoHow you dare tell that to Amazon?
- dexter_it 2y agoI'd be interested to see the percentage of users who have the "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" feature enabled. My guess is .001% or less
- walterbell 2y agoIt's useful to control local Zigbee devices without depending on internet. Echo Plus is a Zigbee hub with US-origin firmware.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoSince only a minority of users want any modicum of privacy, guess it makes sense to remove the option for everybody. Also ignoring the dark patterns in which big tech will make it annoying/obfuscated/unknown that better privacy options are available.
- Aurornis 2y agoIt isn't an option for older devices anyway. The hardware for on-device processing was only in some recent models. I think it's likely that they looked at the numbers and realized they were spending a lot of money putting NPUs on devices and maintaining separate voice parsing models for a very small minority of users.
- happyopossum 2y agoRecent conversation about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268
- neilv 2y agoRelated: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available (discuss.systems) | 929 points by luu 1 day ago | 664 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268
- robotnikman 2y agoYep, gonna unplug my Alexa tonight now. Maybe I'll try setting up openHAB for controlling my smart lights.
- tommoor 2y agoRelated – is anyone working on an open home assistant? Google, Apple, Amazon are all taking so long to bring latest advancements across to their products
- lenerdenator 2y agoThere was Mycroft AI. Not sure what ever became of that.
- lexlash 2y agoDied fighting off a patent troll: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistant_killed_off/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistant_ki...
- asimovfan 2y agoi used to use Mycroft and I thought it functioned quite well. Seems to have ended up here: https://www.openvoiceos.org/about https://www.openvoiceos.org/about
- accrual 2y agoOpen Home Assistant has a voice module. I haven't personally tried it, though. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/
- cyptus 2y agoI did! with their own new hardware (https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/) sadly the microphones are way worse than e.g. in an alexa speaker. Also the performance of the „voice pipelines“ (stt, llm, tts) are a bit of a pain because they are all in sequence and not e.g. using stream features.
- chneu 2y agoYeah home Assistant is going through some voice/AI hiccups at the moment. They're updating to LLM and it's sorta half implemented.
- accrual 2y agoI only have one Alexa and it won't bother me to remove it or replace it with another HomePod. I only use it to check the weather and occasionally to listen to random facts while I get ready in the morning. The fact that it has a digital clock is a nice bonus that HomePods don't yet have, though.
- locusofself 2y agoI would be excited if Apple would add great GPT answering capabilities on my first-gen homepods, even if it meant having to send all queries to the cloud. I can unplug them if I need privacy.
- colkassad 2y agoYears ago after getting one I was messing around in settings on Amazon's Alexa website and noticed a log of commands/messages sent to Alexa. I reviewed them and was horrified to see "why does daddy always beat me". Best to let your daughter win at Uno in this age of always-on connectivity. Or just unplug it, which is what I did.
- stronglikedan 2y ago[flagged]
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoAny other posts you can link to? I searched but couldn't find anything.
- cheschire 2y agoIt sounds like you’re subtly implying that GP was posting a copypasta?
- 240ccccc5205 2y agoI understood it to mean that dads are just really great at Uno
- refulgentis 2y agoGoogle: No results found for "why does daddy always beat me" alexa. I was lucky enough to work on a couple core parts of Google Assistant, in audio, and UI. I viscerally understand what it feels like to hear what comes across as obsessive negativity. It's important to avoid classifying inputs, especially in ways that dismiss reasonable concerns, much less lying about having seen it before.
- nevertoolate 2y agofunny how?
- 2y ago
- boznz 2y agoThis should be a godsend to any FOSS home assistants out there.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OrvalWintermute 2y agoThis Amazon step may make someone else very rich
- lukasb 2y agoI don't understand why Alexa/Siri etc don't just keep their hardcoded rules for things like "set an alarm" and only ship things to a cloud LLM if they don't match a rule.
- mulderc 2y agoBecause that is harder and gives a less consistent experience.
- lukasb 2y agoIt is more complexity than just "ship everything to an LLM and use tool calls", but the payoff - perfect behavior, along with offline support, for your most common inputs - is worth it I think. I disagree about things being less consistent. Let's imagine a 100% LLM world - in this world, you use a bunch of training to try to get the LLM to match your hardcoded responses for common inputs. If you get your training really right, you get 100% accuracy for these inputs. In this world, no one is complaining about consistency! So why not just hardcode that behavior?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoThe whole benefit of LLMs is that humans are not consistent enough. Or at least Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all believe normies don't want to be consistent enough to speak the most common input the same way, allowing to use much simpler and efficient approaches to voice input - like the ones that worked off-line 15+ years ago on a regular PC. LLMs are actually the only reason I'd consider processing voice in the cloud to be a good idea. Alas, knowing how the aforementioned companies designed their assistants in the past, I'm certain they'll find a way to degrade the experience and strip most of the benefits of having LLMs in the loop. After all, as past experience shows, you can't have an assistant letting you operate commercial products and services without speaking the brand names out loud. That's unthinkable.
- neuralspark 2y agoSiri does this for some simpler requests.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Lots of discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536
- walterbell 2y ago500 million Alexa-enabled devices were sold, hopefully some can be repurposed and kept out of landfills. Updating Echo Dot V1 to newer kernel: https://andrerh.gitlab.io/echoroot/ https://andrerh.gitlab.io/echoroot/ Echo Dot V2 Android tinkering, https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki/Echo-Dot-v2 https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki/Echo-Dot-v2 & https://andygoetz.org/tags/dot/ https://andygoetz.org/tags/dot/ & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IEMVDebzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IEMVDebzE
- xyzzy_plugh 2y agoThese devices never supported local processing anyways, right? So, no change there?
- walterbell 2y agoIf older devices can be modified, voice audio could be sent to non-cloud Linux/Mac for Whisper transcription to text command.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoYou would think we could actually do all voice processing locally now? The models that do voice, speech, and language processing aren't that big...an 8b model would be completely feasible for an affordable device, if not home server.
- jedberg 2y agoYou can process the voice to text locally, but it's what you do with the text afterwards that is done in the cloud. In the age of LLMs, even a simple request like "set a timer" is sent to the cloud so that it can be processed in the context of what you've said previously, what devices you own, what time of day it is, etc. etc. And FWIW, you will get a better voice to text in the cloud because that model will know about your device names and other details. For example, if you say, "turn on the kitchen light", the cloud knows you have a light called "kitchen", so if you slur a bit it can still figure it out.
- timschmidt 2y agoAll of that could as easily be done locally. The Echo speaker is likely the hub for the IoT device controlling the kitchen light. None of the context you speak of requires "cloud".
- jedberg 2y ago> All of that could as easily be done locally It cannot. Keep in mind that the Alexa devices are built to be as cheap as possible, so they have minimum amounts of RAM and CPU. The tiniest of models can barely fit on the device. > The Echo speaker is likely the hub for the IoT device controlling the kitchen light. Generally the devices that are controlled by Alexa are done via Wifi from the provider of the device using their own APIs. Very few "Works with Alexa" devices can be controlled locally. But yes, some of them can. However, the Alexa device doesn't know it is called "kitchen". > None of the context you speak of requires "cloud". I just gave you a simple example. Here is a better one that I used down below: Say you live in San Francisco: "Alexa, I'm thinking of going to New York, how many flights are there each day?" This is a hard question, and one that will go to the cloud. "Alexa, what's the weather" This seems like an easy question. But with local only processing, you'd get the weather in San Francisco. But with the LLM, it will probably give you the weather in New York, which is most likely what you wanted if you asked these things just a few seconds apart.
- xyzzy_plugh 2y agoThere seems to be some tremendous confusion here. The vast majority of Alexa-family devices perform no local processing except for the activation word ("Alexa"). I didn't even realize that some of the more recent devices supported an opt-in for local processing. This kind of makes sense, at least to me: local processing will always be limited. The entire premise of the original Echo devices was that all the magic happened in the cloud. It seems like not much has really changed?
- walterbell 2y agoEcho devices since 2021 include hardware NPU for local voice processing to text, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
- londons_explore 2y agoMost Google devices do parallel local processing and cloud processing. The local processing has less latency and works on unstable internet. It's perfect for tasks like 'set an alarm for 8am', even if offline. The remote processing is good for better accuracy of complex words and queries. The results are combined in the UI, making the whole thing feel less leggy (although IMO it still feels laggy to have to wait 1-2 seconds after asking a query to get results).
- edhelas 2y agopikachu_surprised.jpg
- replete 2y agoI've noticed since getting a new mac, that on-device dictation is no longer possible, a modal pops up forcing you to hit agree in order to get dictation. Never clicking that. The direction of major operating systems neutering themselves in favour of deep service integration does not fill one with hope
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoIt’s almost enough to make me try Linux on the desktop again.
- agildehaus 2y agoDo it. Quite a bit has improved in the last few years and I've entirely replaced Windows.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoEhhh but I just bought one of the M4 Mac minis. And it’s pretty nice.
- dnzm 2y agoKeep an eye on [Asahi Linux](https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/), then. A cursory glance shows Me support not being complete yet, but I assume it will be in time (and the missing stuff may or may not be a show stopper for you).
- thfuran 2y agoIs asahi expected to work on them soon, or is it still a few Ms behind?
- gmassman 2y agoIt’s always the year of the linux desktop!
- inetknght 2y ago
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoThrow your wiretap in the garbage where it belongs.
- stronglikedan 2y agoWhy? It's to useful to "belong" in the garbage.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoIt’s useful only to let big tech companies listen in to everything that happens in your home.
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoIt's better to stop the flow of Big Brother-like privacy violations and repurpose it to do something useful than add to e-waste.
- whatever1 2y agoI mean, it seems that local hardware can be a limiting factor on the quality of the LLMs you can deploy. Why should they shoot their feet? Even Apple did open their AI system to OpenAI (and potentially other vendors in the future). As long as there is explicit consent to do so, it is fine. Nobody forces you to buy an Alexa product.
- firtoz 2y agoThere's a way to download all of your Alexa requests. I recommend it to everyone. It was interesting and horrifying to get literally all of them, from day 1. I noticed how tired I sound in the mornings or evenings. I started understanding patterns of my thoughts and needs. The Alexa went to the bin quickly after that session of exploration and insight.
- misterbwong 2y agoLink for those that are interested: https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/prev... Be advised it's not instant.
- amelius 2y agoHeh, you can do the same with your Google searches. Equally horrifying, I suppose.
- southernplaces7 2y agoWhere does Google offer this?
- amelius 2y agohttps://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?pli=1 https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?pli=1
- crazygringo 2y ago> The Alexa went to the bin quickly after that session of exploration and insight. Why? It sounds like it was really interesting and valuable to observe those patterns.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoPresumably because it is a privacy hazard to have someone else storing that kind of data about you
- admiralrohan 2y agoWhat if the internet is off?
- 6stringmerc 2y agoOkay with this level of integration in daily, private life (able to record background noise not related to the request…potentially or actually), consider this: Is Alexa hearing a gunshot a request for assistance? It’s not a voice command, okay, but where does “oh that’s not our business” really end in vast data collection platforms such as this? Does Alexa have any duty to report voice requests about self-harm?
- cpersona 2y agoPure anecdote, but it reminds me of that time, I mentioned on a call that a particular piece of code was a time bomb waiting to explode, only to have Alexa wake up and listen as I was standing nearby and noticed the light. I immediately disconnected it and never looked back.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- noisy_boy 2y agoConsidering what a blatant spyware it is, it is unbelievable that people pay for it (not that I would keep one at my home even if it was free).
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoHuh. How subpoena-able. Great timing! Throw these things in the trash.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoBecause now that local processing is ever-more powerful and local storage dirt-cheap, it's time to move everything to "the cloud." So ignorant, especially with music. Whoops, no Internet access on the plane? No music for you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]