People are volunteerelly paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song.
I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.
I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.
> People are voluntarily paying for their houses to be tapped for the convenience of being able to shout: play me some song. > I’m so out of touch with this world it’s scary.
I could just as easily say "People are voluntarily paying for their locations to be tracked for the convenience of being able to get live maps on the go" (ie. cell phones, which also are listening to everything you say unless you disable it)
“Alexa... play white noise”
“ALEXA... stop”
I also live in a city, so white noise (actually brown noise) masks out tiny noises that interrupt sleep.
clap clap
Clap off
clap clap
Clap on, clap off. The Clapper!
clap clap
Mankind has made countless decisions to trade convenience for some degree of personal freedom. I can live without mobile internet - its just so convenient to have it. Voice control for home appliances is exactly the same.
I can also control my tv, thermostat, get a news briefing, check my calendar and set reminders.
Yes, it's ultimately a convenience, but so is indoor plumbing and store bought bread.
I’m sorry, clean water and food are not conviniences. They are among the most basics of human needs. That’s the kind of thing that scares me. That someone would make such a comparison with a straight face.
Have you ever considered that this is not the case in most of the world? Resources are far from evenly distributed.
It is not by chance that the availability of indoor plumbing correlates to increase in life expectancy. It's nice that I can just open the tap and clean water comes out, but it's also a lot more sanitary than people carrying and storing buckets around.
>I just cannot work out if the commenter was being deliberately obtuse or really misunderstood?
Same here. Comparing the savings of a few steps towards a light switch to clean water and cheap food is intellectual dishonesty at best and severe ignorance at worse.
Neither of which is needed to live. Both of which are conveniences.
Convenience does, absolutely, have strong value and can be meaningful improvement to one's life. Generalized voice control is a major and meaningful convenience - even if it's currently early and might have some problems - because it drastically changes how we can interact with our environments.
Sure, we can short sell the case as "not needing to walk to a light switch", but even then if it's dark, my arms are full, and the path to the switch is littered with children's toys then that's a meaningful improvement to be able to say "Hey google, turn on the living room light".
Consider cases of people with severe MS or who otherwise can't easily walk. Sure, they could hook up a remote control and keep it near them, or get one of those stupid clapper things, but even then that only works for the lights.
A generalized voice assistant gives me control over my house, from anywhere my voice can be heard, and not only executes my actions, but can give me realtime feedback and data. Best of all, this requires no special skills on my part, just a willingness to talk to the damned thing loudly and clearly with simple words.
Can it act as a wire tap? Of course it can. My store bought bread can also be contaminated (right now in my area there is a huge contamination issue with eggs and lettuce), my indoor plumbing can burst and flood my house, so on. It's a new technology, it has kinks and flaws, and we're currently in the early adopter curve of it moving towards the initial disappointment trend.
My disagreement with you is precisely because you consider them equally interchangeable.
To me, putting those two on the same level is actually offensive.
If data on the increased life expectancy isn’t persuasive enough, I suggest you speak with someone with no access to basic sanitation. Ask them what they think of this comparison.
I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.
I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.
But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)
We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.
Similarly, there is a massive difference in the privacy implications of listening to every conversation everyone in your home (including guests) is having vs. having your current location known. Wiretapping laws exist for a reason.
To be fair, you can have all the maps without the location tracking; the location tracking just tells you where you are on the map.
This is not the world we should be engineering. Actually, I would say, this is not engineering.
There's no reason why your house needs to be "tapped" for either of those use cases. All those things could be accomplished without leaving your home network.
/s
This is just whataboutism.
We can complain about Amazon in a thread about Amazon without having to tackle a whole different issue.
The whole point of these cylinders is to be listening at all times.
Yes, it’s ultimately trust in the device maker, the compiler, the chip manufacturer, etc, and those can and have been verified to some extent.
But that’s not the point. A phone can listen or not, where you have no doubt with the cylinder. It’s its raison d'etre.
And people know this. It’s not like they are being misled. It’s a conscious exchange of privacy for convinence. It’s just that, in my mind, you are getting very little for what you’re giving.
I made a different choice, but I totally understand why someone would choose not to have a phone or smart speaker due to privacy concerns. What I don’t get is someone who has a phone but sees smart speakers as crazy.
- You are pretty certain that your phone is listening at all times, even though it's set not to.
- You see no difference between a product that's advertised manly as a listening device and one that also has such a feature, that can theoretically be turned off, and is very useful otherwise.
I see no difference, privacy-wise, between the two. I don’t care how they’re advertised, I care what they’re capable of.
I'm sure you can appreciate the difference: press a button to talk to Siri vs Siri is always listening.
The latter seems crazy to me, on a phone, cylinder, laptop or whatever device it's implemented.
If that was the case, nothing. But we have enough evidence to believe it's not. While having the device listen, even though it's been explicitly configured not to, is a bit more of a stretch.
>Are you just worried about accidental activation?
That could be an inconvenience too, but I'm more concerned with malicious intent.
If you’re concerned with malicious intent then I really don’t understand the difference. If the device maker is trustworthy then you’re fine either way. If they’re malicious then you’re screwed either way. A setting for “please don’t listen” isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference if they’re malicious. M
Nor should anyone I think.
It seems to me that smartphones are significantly worse. You can unplug your smart speaker or kick it off your WiFi and be confident that it can no longer hear you. Smartphones have batteries and cellular data connections. Also they’re usually with you at all times, even when you’re away from home.
A lot of people talk about it, they’re just laughed or shouted down. There’s also the argument that mobile phones undoubtedly offer a number of incredibly useful tools, not the least of which is a primary phone line. I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue for commensurate utility from Alexa or similar products.
“Networked device with microphone records and uploads your voice” might create reactions such as: yeah, what did you expect, how else would it work?
“Networked device with microphone records and uploads your voice even when explicitly told not to” is a lot worse. Company X is lying to us!
My guess is they mostly do work that way but bugs and vulnerabilities don't seem like a stretch. (As is to be expected with all software)
If you actually care, this would be pretty trivial to verify using an oscilloscope to observe the energy draw from the battery while different things are said around your device.
Is this possible of a Pi?
Then all that's left to figure out is...
1. Make it work really well across a vast array of voices, accents, and background noise.
2. Make is easy to add new features to, in order to keep up with the competition.
3. Mass produce it at a price people will pay.
4. Have a viable business model.
Do these simple things and you'll be a very, very rich person.
Looks cool, but I haven’t tried. I’m the kind of person that gets up and walks to the light switch.
That said....we are on track to have a high quality experience when we go to production in Feb 2019 ( Release 19.02 ). As an open source community we'd welcome any help folks have to offer. Contributors don't even need to know how to code, all they need to be able to do is listen to sound samples at https://home.mycroft.ai and tag them as "Hey, Mycroft" or not "Hey, Mycroft"
Thanks to everyone who is helping make Mycroft a reality!
- people in the sixties: "the government will wiretap your home"
- people now: "hey wiretap, can cats eat pancakes?"
And about tapped .. well, I don't consider any conversation as private, when there is a Smartphone around.
Is there nothing you've ever said about anybody while in the vicinity of a smartphone that you wouldn't have said to their face?
There also other things, like pillow talk etc.
And I simply don't want anyone else to take part in that, whether they are russian, chinese or NSA hackers, or the company by itself.
And I usually tell people in their face, what I think of them.
Perfect example. Do you always ensure there are no smartphones within earshot?
But I would certainly try to do this in this situation as well.
It is not only privacy btw. it is also just nice to have both persons here in the now and not half distracted because the Smartphone just got new messages. Could be important... but usually never is important enough, to destroy the moment.
So when I go to sleep, alone or not, the mobile is off (without battery) or away. Unless there might be a emergency and I need to be avaiable, but those situations are rare.