5 ms·

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company (https://juno-labs.com/ https://juno-labs.com/) is pushing – an always on, always listening A

by paxys 9mo ago

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company (https://juno-labs.com/ https://juno-labs.com/) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Have all your guests consented to this? What happens when someone breaks in and steals the box? What if the government wants to take a look at the data in there and serves a warrant? What if a large company comes knocking and makes an acquistion offer? Will all the privacy guarantees still stand in face of the $$$ ?

zmmmmm 9mo ago
The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it. I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.
- ajuhasz 9mo ago
  Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period and we won't be able to appease them). Some of our decisions in this direction: - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen) - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM) We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation around this.
  - bossyTeacher 8mo ago
    > - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory I believe you should allow people to set how long the raw data should be stored as well as dead man switches.
  - sixtyj 8mo ago
    Device should have been accompanied with a lot of examples so people are really aware how stored data could be misused. Alexa or any other similar device - their users are technically illiterate. Do you remember leaks of movie stars’ iPhone images? Multiply it by thousands… Court order, burglars, hackers - all bad actors imaginable… For you, as producer, those situations can be a nightmare if not well described in operating conditions. And devices should not be pre-setup (don’t be “Google-evil”, as they track everything if you don’t set it up different; and it is always hidden deep in the third level menu under 2-steps verification)
- HWR_14 9mo ago
  > Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
  - rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
    There’s an interesting loophole for Face ID…
    - estimator7292 8mo ago
      In the US, law enforcement is specifically allowed to compel biometric scans to unlock personal devices.
      - schrodinger 8mo ago
        FYI -- Because of this, Apple made a feature where if you click the power button 5 times, your phone goes into "needs the passcode to unlock" mode. Whenever I'm approaching a border crossing (e.g. in an airport), I'm sure to discreetly click power 5 times. You also get haptic feedback on the 5th click so you can be sure it worked even from within your pocket.
  - eel 8mo ago
    At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration, regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop replaced. That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it definitely had me thinking how they might approach other tradeoffs. What if the Department of Justice wants you to hand over some customer data that you can legally refuse, but you are simultaneously negotiating a multi-billion dollar cloud hosting deal with the same Department of Justice? What tradeoff does the company make? Totally hypothetical situation, of course.
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  > nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over I'm being a bit flippant here, but thermite typically works fine.
  - DontForgetMe 8mo ago
    Tricky to take data off the cloud, even with thermite
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
ajuhasz 9mo ago
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for higher transcription accuracy). Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored. Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on feedback if this is the correct decision.
BoxFour 9mo ago
It’s definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum, a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this period). The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.
- yndoendo 9mo ago
  A good example of this is what one of my family member's partner said. "Isn't creep that you just talked about something and now you are seeing ads for it. Guess we just have to accept it." My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted. There is no privacy in those services. They did not like that response.
  - dotancohen 9mo ago
    I used to be considered a weirdo and creep because I would answer the question of why don't I have WhatsApp with the answer "I do not accept their terms of service". Now people accept this answer. I don't know what changed, but the general public is starting to figure out that that actually can disagree with large tech companies.
- bandrami 9mo ago
  I want a hardware switch for the microphone. If it can hear the wake word it's already listening.
com2kid 9mo ago
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls. I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother. I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful. Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab. Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about. I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.
- reilly3000 9mo ago
  It really is a prosthetic for minds that struggle to organize themselves.
  - allovertheworld 8mo ago
    Like a calendar
- ramenbytes 9mo ago
  > Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab. > Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about. > I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing. Those don't sound like things that you need AI for.
SkyPuncher 9mo ago
I agree. I also don't really have an ambient assistant problem. My phone is always nearby and Siri picks up wake words well (or I just hold the powerbutton). My problem is Siri doesn't do any of this stuff well. I'd really love to just get it out of the way so someone can build it better.
- ajuhasz 9mo ago
  Some of the more magical moments we’ve had with Juno is automatic shopping list creation saying “oh no we are out of milk and eggs” out loud without having to remember to tell Siri becomes a shopping list and event tracking around kids “Don’t forget next Thursday is early pickup”. A nice freebie is moving the wake word to the end. “What’s weather Juno today?” becomes much more natural than a prefixed wake word.
- DontForgetMe 8mo ago
  Honestly this has been my main issue with the tech privacy issue for years. I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair trade off for what was promised. Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the convenience. I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data when I couldn't usefully access any of it? Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have it turn on the lights, play music etc. Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the alarm will go off So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms. So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any time. I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so ugly. I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here. If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a decent product? If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want? If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and more data. It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to develop decent, reliable products
throwaway5465 9mo ago
They seem quite honest with who they are and how they do what they do.
drdaeman 9mo ago
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories? Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machine can supplement that in the same way my glasses supplement my vision, or my friend's hearing aid supplements his hearing - that'd be nice. That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right? But, as I said, there is an important condition. Today, what's in my head stays in there, and is only directly available to me. The machine-assisted memory aid must provide the same guarantees. If any information leaves the device without my direct instruction - that's a hard "no". If someone with physical access to the device can extract the information without a lot of effort - that's also a hard "no". If someone can too easily impersonate myself to the device and improperly gain access - that's another "no". Maybe there are a few more criteria, but I hope you got the overall idea. If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy - no more than I can do myself. And then - yeah - I want it, wish there'd be something like that.
- dbtc 9mo ago
  This will not augment memory the way glasses do for sight, this will replace memory the way a wheelchair replaces legs.
  - estimator7292 8mo ago
    So do you think disabled people deserve to participate in society or not?
    - walt_grata 8mo ago
      Yes but able bodied people shouldnt decide to use a wheelchair until their legs attrophy and become useless.
      - 8mo ago
tzs 9mo ago
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything there that said it saved conversations. It sounds like it processes them as they happen and then takes actions that it thinks will help you achieve whatever goals of your it can infer from the conversation.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
junofan 8mo ago
I’m 99% sure this article is AI generated. Regardless, people will gravitate to the tool that solves their problems. If their problem is finding a local plumber or a restaurant they like, advertising will be involved.

by paxys 9mo ago

zmmmmm 9mo ago

The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it. I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.

ajuhasz 9mo ago
Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period and we won't be able to appease them). Some of our decisions in this direction: - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen) - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM) We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation around this.
- bossyTeacher 8mo ago
  > - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory I believe you should allow people to set how long the raw data should be stored as well as dead man switches.
- sixtyj 8mo ago
  Device should have been accompanied with a lot of examples so people are really aware how stored data could be misused. Alexa or any other similar device - their users are technically illiterate. Do you remember leaks of movie stars’ iPhone images? Multiply it by thousands… Court order, burglars, hackers - all bad actors imaginable… For you, as producer, those situations can be a nightmare if not well described in operating conditions. And devices should not be pre-setup (don’t be “Google-evil”, as they track everything if you don’t set it up different; and it is always hidden deep in the third level menu under 2-steps verification)
HWR_14 9mo ago
> Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
- rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
  There’s an interesting loophole for Face ID…
  - estimator7292 8mo ago
    In the US, law enforcement is specifically allowed to compel biometric scans to unlock personal devices.
    - schrodinger 8mo ago
      FYI -- Because of this, Apple made a feature where if you click the power button 5 times, your phone goes into "needs the passcode to unlock" mode. Whenever I'm approaching a border crossing (e.g. in an airport), I'm sure to discreetly click power 5 times. You also get haptic feedback on the 5th click so you can be sure it worked even from within your pocket.
- eel 8mo ago
  At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration, regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop replaced. That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it definitely had me thinking how they might approach other tradeoffs. What if the Department of Justice wants you to hand over some customer data that you can legally refuse, but you are simultaneously negotiating a multi-billion dollar cloud hosting deal with the same Department of Justice? What tradeoff does the company make? Totally hypothetical situation, of course.
Sharlin 8mo ago
> nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over I'm being a bit flippant here, but thermite typically works fine.
- DontForgetMe 8mo ago
  Tricky to take data off the cloud, even with thermite
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

ajuhasz 9mo ago

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for higher transcription accuracy). Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored. Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on feedback if this is the correct decision.

BoxFour 9mo ago

It’s definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum, a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this period). The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.

yndoendo 9mo ago
A good example of this is what one of my family member's partner said. "Isn't creep that you just talked about something and now you are seeing ads for it. Guess we just have to accept it." My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted. There is no privacy in those services. They did not like that response.
- dotancohen 9mo ago
  I used to be considered a weirdo and creep because I would answer the question of why don't I have WhatsApp with the answer "I do not accept their terms of service". Now people accept this answer. I don't know what changed, but the general public is starting to figure out that that actually can disagree with large tech companies.
bandrami 9mo ago
I want a hardware switch for the microphone. If it can hear the wake word it's already listening.

com2kid 9mo ago

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls. I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother. I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful. Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab. Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about. I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.

reilly3000 9mo ago
It really is a prosthetic for minds that struggle to organize themselves.
- allovertheworld 8mo ago
  Like a calendar
ramenbytes 9mo ago
> Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab. > Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about. > I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing. Those don't sound like things that you need AI for.

SkyPuncher 9mo ago

I agree. I also don't really have an ambient assistant problem. My phone is always nearby and Siri picks up wake words well (or I just hold the powerbutton). My problem is Siri doesn't do any of this stuff well. I'd really love to just get it out of the way so someone can build it better.

ajuhasz 9mo ago
Some of the more magical moments we’ve had with Juno is automatic shopping list creation saying “oh no we are out of milk and eggs” out loud without having to remember to tell Siri becomes a shopping list and event tracking around kids “Don’t forget next Thursday is early pickup”. A nice freebie is moving the wake word to the end. “What’s weather Juno today?” becomes much more natural than a prefixed wake word.
DontForgetMe 8mo ago
Honestly this has been my main issue with the tech privacy issue for years. I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair trade off for what was promised. Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the convenience. I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data when I couldn't usefully access any of it? Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have it turn on the lights, play music etc. Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the alarm will go off So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms. So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any time. I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so ugly. I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here. If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a decent product? If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want? If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and more data. It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to develop decent, reliable products

throwaway5465 9mo ago

They seem quite honest with who they are and how they do what they do.

drdaeman 9mo ago

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories? Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machine can supplement that in the same way my glasses supplement my vision, or my friend's hearing aid supplements his hearing - that'd be nice. That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right? But, as I said, there is an important condition. Today, what's in my head stays in there, and is only directly available to me. The machine-assisted memory aid must provide the same guarantees. If any information leaves the device without my direct instruction - that's a hard "no". If someone with physical access to the device can extract the information without a lot of effort - that's also a hard "no". If someone can too easily impersonate myself to the device and improperly gain access - that's another "no". Maybe there are a few more criteria, but I hope you got the overall idea. If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy - no more than I can do myself. And then - yeah - I want it, wish there'd be something like that.

dbtc 9mo ago
This will not augment memory the way glasses do for sight, this will replace memory the way a wheelchair replaces legs.
- estimator7292 8mo ago
  So do you think disabled people deserve to participate in society or not?
  - walt_grata 8mo ago
    Yes but able bodied people shouldnt decide to use a wheelchair until their legs attrophy and become useless.
    - 8mo ago

tzs 9mo ago

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything there that said it saved conversations. It sounds like it processes them as they happen and then takes actions that it thinks will help you achieve whatever goals of your it can infer from the conversation.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

junofan 8mo ago

I’m 99% sure this article is AI generated. Regardless, people will gravitate to the tool that solves their problems. If their problem is finding a local plumber or a restaurant they like, advertising will be involved.