When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?
If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing.
Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".
I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.
If Amazon can somehow monetize my primary use of Echo as a glorified kitchen timer I will be impressed.
FREE vs. $99? No contest there my friend
Aside from that, I didn't purchase the Echo with the intent of it being primarily kitchen timer. It just so happens that after owning it for over a year my usage of it is mostly limited to that.
My usage is probably around 85% timers and alarms, 10% streaming music, 4% shopping lists, and 1% everything else.
Do you think you've used like you thought you would, or did you have ideas about how you might use and those didn't pan out or the device didn't work very well for those?
I really didn't have a particular use case in mind at the start, but I was (and still am) impressed by the sound quality from such a small speaker. It's nice to be looking in the fridge and say "Alexa add X to my shopping list" or when my hands are covered with flour say "Alexa set a timer for 30 minutes" or whatever. And for those things it's worth the cost to me.
Most of the features that have rolled out just seem gimmicky, though. Take the news briefing: It either provides too little info to be useful, or it drones on and I get annoyed by the voice which, while it sounds natural compared to Microsoft Sam, still feels cold and artificial. In general I like having more control over my internet actions. I'll never use it to order a pizza or anything from Amazon because I don't know what happens if it misinterprets me or I make a mistake. And the third party apps are clunky ("Alexa, ask X to do Y").
To sum it up, aside from the very basic features I've used since day one it just feels like a toy.
I'm less than enthusiastic about a $180 kitchen timer that uploads everything I say to the cloud for analysis, even if I understand that the analysis is to some degree necessary to improve the voice recognition.
It occurs to me that the background noise in your home actually reveals a whole lot about the self:
- What you're listening to and when
- What you're watching and when
- What type of gentleman's material you enjoy and when
- When you leave home and get home
- When you wake up, when you go to bed
Some of these can be limited by the size of your house, but the trend in urban dwellings has been towards smaller so one unit could presumably capture every sound in your home.
The tech insanity has really gone far ..
When I wake, sleep, leave, and come home could be monitored by Echo, but it's also already being monitored by other devices I own, and it's data I'm not particularly concerned about at the moment.
Not sure how other people feel about talking out loud at home, but as someone who also lives alone (in a 250 sqft apartment) and always wears headphones, I can't really imagine talking out loud. Just seems weird for some reason. I never use Siri either.
Wonder if that's a living alone thing, or a small apartment thing, or ...?
It's a deflationary race to the bottom. The bottom is a hell where everything watches you and sells absolutely everything about you to whomever can afford to buy the data.
Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world -- how else would they make appointments and reservations, book flights, find out what the weather would be, etc.? The whole point is to be connected to the outside world, automatic or no.
There's a difference between the "always on" communication these devices have and communication the user specifically requests.
When I want to make an airline reservation, I'm requesting the device to send the booking information to the airline. I'm not asking it to send a recording to the mothership of everything that happened in my home for the last 5 hours, which a human assistant would never do.
You have to be able to trust that Echo isn't recording everything you say, unless you prefix it with "Alexa", and that this behavior will never change (say this is the behavior for the average user, but with a police warrant, they're able to tap your Echo).
I'm part of the group that thinks the tradeoff is worth it for the convenience, but I understand why many people would disagree.
Besides any contact with outside world would need communication. So you can't have an entirely standalone gadget.
I wonder if the internet archive has a record of the size required minus images.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-co...
Of course:
a) it's not open source so we can't be sure (aside from monitoring network traffic, which is probably encrypted)
b) if the FBI is successful in compelling Apple to develop a backdoor for the iPhone there's nothing stopping them from compelling Amazon to do the same with Echo.
c) better hope you don't say "Alexa" or something Echo mistakes for it.
No backdoor needed if they information is sent to Amazon. All that is needed is a court order for Amazon to hand it over.
I'm suggesting in order for the FBI to use Echo (or any other internet connected device that has a microphone) as a wiretap, the FBI could try to compel the manufacturer to write, sign, and push an update that causes the device to transmit audio to the FBI at any point.
That would have seemed a little far fetched in the past, but the current FBI/Apple situation could set a precedent.
It would also be possible to take a look at the hardware design and determine the linkage between the "mic mute" button light being on and power going to the mics.
The customer can set the device to provide both audio and visual indication when it "wakes up" and begins streaming to the cloud. And, of course, the customer can also press the mic mute button to avoid accidental wake up.
Yes, the FBI could try the same approach with Amazon as they are trying with Apple. For all of our sake, let's hope that Apple wins.
How would the mics listen for the wake word if they aren't always on?
My point was that you could check to see if the linkage between that red indicator light and the power going to the mics was in software or hardware.
This is analogous to the warning light that many laptops have for when the built-in webcam is on.
I do worry about said court orders being rubber stamps, and about surveillance that DOESNT require a court order.
Otherwise we can make no technological advancement.
One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home network to the cloud, only so that I can then stream it back into my home network for viewing??? WTF? That's both a waste of outbound bandwidth and a waste of inbound bandwidth. I should be able to put it on my network, switch off the cable modem, and still be able to view video locally. How hard is that? I could do that with a webcam and a really long USB cable!
My guess is: if they offered the version you describe, they'd need to make it much more expensive. Which many consumers would find odd: the one with fewer features would cost much more. Granted, those consumers wouldn't be looking at the big picture...but I find many consumers don't. Up front costs matter a lot to consumers.
A webcam that sends the data out to the internet then back would avoid the discovery issue by using an external webserver as a rendezvous point.
I don't think people spend a lot of time thinking about their home networking. You could imagine most people just plug in their home routers and it is a crapshoot whether or not the router will support the necessary functionality, whereas a router will always enable communication to the outside world (or people would return it ASAP).
With that said, this seems like a straightforward technical problem that may have technical solutions.
If you willing configure a NAS server somewhere, you can even record the video locally.
If you, as a customer, want to, you can go to Amazon.com and delete all your voice history (or any single interaction).
... Then you gain life experience.
/75% jokingly
These things would be a lot less "Big Brother" for me if I had a mic key in my pocket that would only turn the mic on when I squeezed it.
I am sure you would not have a problem using these kinds of systems if it were assured that you could not be tracked or monitored because the devices and systems were secured in overlapping ways.
So now this cool audio controlled personal assistant is just another gadget to buy more stuff from Amazon, instead of something you control.
Voice recognition is done on some Amazon server. If it goes down or changes API in five years, it will render this thing a brick.