All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
I don’t need smart XYZ appliances that connect to the internet. After working a decade in the industry, I’ve seen enough of what these companies do with user data. No thank you.
Also, I don’t speak English at home. So that’s a hedge for now I guess.
mr_mitm 3 days ago [-]
> All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Not only could they listen at any time (albeit with lower quality), I put extremely personal information into my phone via the screen keyboard all the time. How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
jchw 3 days ago [-]
> The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Let me just be the first to say I absolutely have an issue with smartphones.
(edit: Of course, I could very well count in the 'almost nobody' category, but the same might well be true in general for people concerned about smart devices.)
bigiain 3 days ago [-]
I also absolutely have an issue with smartphones and privacy.
But I'm also a pragmatist.
In my opinion Apple, while not even approaching being "perfect", are most likely to be the least worst of all practical options. 5 or 10 years back, I would have ranked Google's Pixel phones in 2nd, but not so much these days, if they're still 2nd they're a long long way back from 1st and only second because every other choice is so so bad. I used to buy Samsung phones back in the Galaxy S2 up to Galaxy S6 era, but they did so many bad-for-security things I no longer trust them with any of my data.
I don't trust any of the Chinese brand at all. Although I do have a few super inexpensive Chinese Android tablets that get used on a non internet connected subnet as home automation controllers. Even if they do manage to phone home, the only sensitive data they have is the private subnet wifi password and the always-on VPN endpoint through the router. I like to think (but cannot prove) that Chinese manufacturing hasn't managed to plant working backdoors in every iPhone they build, and that if they have targetted supply chain attacks for individual or small batches of devices that I'm not interesting enough to burn one of those on. I do sometimes wonder whether Jamal Khashoggi thought that too though...
I've "settled" with the level of security I believe my iPhone gives me. Partly because I long ago made peace with the fact that if a nation state security agency even became "interested" in my, I've already lost the game. I've given up trying to protect myself against the NSA or Mossad or the MSS or the FSB, or even "second tier" security agencies like my local ASIS. I do what I can to make it hard for adversaries like organised crime, scammers, script kiddies, and surveillance capitalists, and I'd like to think I've done enough that law enforcement (short of ASIS) probably can't access data on my devices via technical means (while knowing full well they have the capability to ruin my life if I refuse to hand over password and decryption keys).
wkat4242 2 days ago [-]
I don't think apple is the best. You still end up with lots of data collection by Apple.
Degoogled Android like Graphene is way better for privacy as long as you are careful with the apps you install.
southernplaces7 24 hours ago [-]
ASIS?
stevesimmons 9 hours ago [-]
Australian Secret Intelligence Service
ranger_danger 3 days ago [-]
> How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
Probably because phone manufacturers have historically not done things as bad as Amazon has privacy-wise.
But you're right. They could.
rednafi 3 days ago [-]
Touche
3 days ago [-]
nativeit 3 days ago [-]
Soft Welsh accents are really good for robots, because they combine the sort of officious, authoritative British English accent with a folksy, approachable quality. Then they wait for you to go to sleep…and with a lilting brogue glancing faintly off the meniscus of your dreams you hear, “Ay, oi, Dave! They’re out, it’s time.” and that’s how the world ends. A Welsh-accent LLM named “Dave” decides sheep husbandry is the maximally productive utility for the Earth and Solar System. Humanity is lost. Dave the AI companion from Swansea and a trillion sheep remain.
oniony 2 days ago [-]
I'll poppity-ping to that.
jadavies 2 days ago [-]
Beware trying to make linguistic jokes in another language. It's "popty-ping" which is slang for a microwave oven.
oniony 2 days ago [-]
I'll try to smwoothio out my Welsh wrinkles.
nomel 3 days ago [-]
They can technically store, but not always legally, since storage may be in violation of their privacy policy. For example, Apple won't store the audio, unless you opt in [1].
Christian Bale's real accent is cockney english. His interviews are... very jarring.
neofrommatrix 3 days ago [-]
What else do they do with the user data besides ads targeting? Serious question.
cool_dude85 3 days ago [-]
What if you're a green card holder and say "Palestine" in the privacy of your own home? We may not be there now but it's not far.
winterbloom 2 days ago [-]
Non-issue. However if you start saying pro Hamas sentences..
nextts 10 hours ago [-]
Nope the lack of a 1A (in practice) seems to apply squarely to Palestine
nativeit 2 days ago [-]
Go on, you were saying that’s exceptional because…
doublerabbit 2 days ago [-]
All content recorded from the echo could be used in court against you.
rednafi 3 days ago [-]
I’ve seen privately identifiable information (PII) along with patient records sent over to 3rd party agencies.
alwa 3 days ago [-]
A relative’s doctor’s practice just got acquired by one of these private-equity-backed profit-hungry medical chains.
I went with him to an appointment. As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet at the office, he had to sign away his HIPAA rights for them to sell his charts, along with his identity information, to advertisers or any other third parties. I was beside myself.
Wasn’t long afterward before he started seeing insultingly specific (but medically incorrect) prescription drug ads, almost exclusively, on his TV service.
walterbell 2 days ago [-]
> As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet
As with QR codes in restaurants, reception tablets with NDA boilerplate, or electronic security scanners, declining to use an electronic device can lead to the magical appearance of a manual alternative, where lines of text on paper can be crossed out manually before signing and taking a photo for your records.
This is because the consent (of 99% who will not decline) is only valid if the 1% who choose to decline can actually do so. If everyone is forced and it's literally impossible to decline consent, then none of it is consent, and they may as well omit the text and do whatever they want anyway. The act of asking consent for ridiculous terms is actually quite positive, if one ignores the implied pressure of a silicon wrapping.
nativeit 2 days ago [-]
Wait, I can just cross out the lines I don’t like? That opens up a ton of possibilities…
I’m actually fully on-board with everything in this thread. This should obviously be taken more seriously than it is.
walterbell 2 days ago [-]
> I can just cross out the lines I don't like?
Well, they can always refuse service, but now their refusal is linked specifically to the crossed-out lines, an action that can lead to various paths. If the deleted lines are known by them to be overreaching, they are economically better off to provide service and earn revenue, instead of losing 100% of revenue and appointment slot to a minor technicality worth much less.
exe34 23 hours ago [-]
the way it works with a contract, you can always choose to remove clauses - but the other party has to agree to it too. they might acquiesce if for example, they think denying you service might actually lead to a lawsuit that would point out their illegal behaviour.
walterbell 2 days ago [-]
ChatGPT says:
Healthcare providers or institutions may require a patient to sign certain forms related to the treatment or payment process (like consent forms for treatment or payment authorization), but these forms cannot waive the patient's fundamental rights under HIPAA. If a patient feels coerced into signing anything, they can refuse or ask for clarification before signing. If they don't want to sign, it shouldn't prevent them from receiving care, although certain administrative procedures (like billing or insurance claims) might be impacted.
ec109685 3 days ago [-]
For clarity sake, this is what "Do not send voice recordings" used to do [1]:
"Here’s how it works: When you turn on Do Not Send Voice Recordings and say your chosen wake word, an on-device algorithm will process and transcribe your request to Alexa from audio into text. The text is encrypted and sent to Amazon’s secure cloud where we can fulfill your interaction. After processing, the audio of your request is deleted."
So they transcribed the voice and sent the text to the cloud. Surprising that needs to go to allow GenAI to work?
I've always wondered what kinds of things can happen within the specifics of privacy policies nowadays.
Like I think it would be possible to have text/voice/object recognition work on the photos you send in an end-to-end encrypted chat app, described out-of-band and used for ... purposes.
<encrypted data stream>
<"spoken keyword: starbucks">
<"picture: LG washing machine">
<"picture: donald trump">
<"text: prescription xanax">
walterbell 2 days ago [-]
Alexa with GenAI is a paid (via Prime for now) product, right?
Echo can work offline for control of Zigbee devices connected to Echo (non-Dot) Gen4, which is a Zigbee hub with US firmware. Voice commands such as "Turn Porch Light On" can be processed locally on Echo and executed immediately, without an internet connection, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
If an Alexa customer is using this offline functionality today, with no interest in GenAI or other online features, how can Amazon remove it?
userbinator 3 days ago [-]
Why bother to mandate telescreens in each home, when the people will do it themselves and willingly pay for the privilege of being monitored.
rdtsc 3 days ago [-]
The Stasi or the KGB would have loved to install listening devices into everyone's homes, so they can monitor everyone. And here we are, people are voluntarily doing it. It's like a dream come true, just a few decades too late.
neuralRiot 2 days ago [-]
The ting is that probaly the most interesting individuals to them wouldn’t get those devices at home or at sensitive places.
PlunderBunny 3 days ago [-]
1984 but we chose it instead of it being forced on us.
GuinansEyebrows 3 days ago [-]
Not only did we choose it, we felt lucky to be alive in a time where we were afforded the privilege to purchase it
burch45 3 days ago [-]
Brave New World.
t-writescode 3 days ago [-]
Fahrenheit 451 has whole rooms full of screens with, I think, virtual/pretend people that people enjoy talking to.
2 days ago [-]
autoexec 3 days ago [-]
Right? Who honestly didn't think these devices would be used to spy on them and their homes? Even after reports of third party contractors listening to people having sex made headlines people continued to buy and keep them.
Just like some people need to touch a hot stove to learn they need to be careful some people will just refuse to accept anything bad is happening to them until they see it with their own eyes and surveillance capitalism exploits that by keeping the harms so removed from the collection of private data that most people will never accept the connection even after they're told about what's happening.
nativeit 2 days ago [-]
During COVID there were a lot of (mostly right wing) conspiracy theories about Bill Gates sneaking nano-chips into vaccines. These same people went on to support the world’s richest wanker who literally owns a company intent on human microchip implantation. Up is down, black is white, spheres are flat…Humid sacks of rice, bats and hogs sniffing each other, massive stereos
gblargg 3 days ago [-]
"In the future they will carry their telescreens with them, even into the bathroom."
RajT88 3 days ago [-]
Anyone have any experience with the offline OSS offerings?
Eager to replace my cheap Echo devices with more expensive privacy friendly options.
Another question: anyone aware of community custom firmware efforts? I know early gen devices had some exploits but it never resulted to much last I checked.
sofixa 3 days ago [-]
I've used Home Assistant Voice (Preview Edition) and ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside Home Assistant 's Voice capabilities - by default there are phrases included, and you can add your own, but you have to be precise - "turn off the lights" and "turn off the lamp" are two separate phrases (or a variable one, which can be expanded by a locally (or not) hosted LLM.
Voice detection is pretty good, especially on the Voice, even from across a room. Not 100% (especially with higher pitched voices), but definitely high and usable. The main downside is the fact that you either need to host a local LLM, which isn't cheap, or predefine all phrases you want.
joshstrange 2 days ago [-]
What has your experience been with Home Assistant voice? I also have one but still use my Alexa’s. I love HA and it runs my house but my initial tests were not great. I tried both OpenAI and HA cloud assistants but I could have spent more time tweaking things and I bet I could have done a lot by writing my own prompt.
sofixa 2 hours ago [-]
It's OK in terms of voice recognition, as in, it almost always work. But integrating with an external LLM for more flexibility in voice commands has been a meh experience and doesn't work perfectly (to be fair, I'm using an external OpenAI compatible API, so it might be something to do with that).
stavros 3 days ago [-]
I'd really love something that enabled me to use the hardware without Home Assistant. I know it's OSS (basically ESPhome), but I'd like a server I could point my Voice thing to and be able to receive a webhook with the text I just spoke, and have it read the text that my server returns out loud.
I'd implement the actual smarts myself, I just want the STT/TTS interface sorted.
zrail 3 days ago [-]
Home Assistant uses the Wyoming protocol to talk to Whisper, Piper, and the various other components of the speech pipeline. Might be something to check out?
Yep, I had seen that but I didn't go deeper than that. I'll have another look, thanks!
nickthegreek 3 days ago [-]
Home assistant is your gateway into this. You can even run it all locally with decent but not outrageous specs or plug into a cloud api. There is even an option to process home control locally and send other queries to the cloud.
genewitch 3 days ago [-]
It is literally impossible to transcribe voice, especially if you whisper. There's no way to model the language, it's too large - amanzon has many computers. Your computer is like a tortoise, it can't do text-to-speech. There's no way you can get any of this to use the Web, Dav... er, Cal. Trying to do this would be like trying to torch a python with your bare metal hands.
so in conclusion: nope.
amy_petrik 2 days ago [-]
This topic comes up periodically and I feel that there is an underlying incorrect assumption about the use case. The assumption is that these devices, mobile phones, etc, run speech-to-text and upload text to the company. Quite an undertaking!
Consider the humble "Clapper", a 1980s vintage device that turned lights on or off with a simple clap of the hand. This device has a vocabulary of 1 word, a clap, yes or no. Now consider that our device or cellular telephone has a vocabulary of 32 words such as "car," "baby," "television," "insurance" and so on. Much much easier to ONLY look for those trigger words and slip 5 extra bits somewhere into a network packet. Suddenly you gets ads for a car dealership, an insurance company, children's formula, and so on.
nextts 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah recognising some words and having a hand crafted decision tree over an LLM can go a long way to get useful shit done.
Setting a timer, calling someone, turning on a light.
But is local CPU Speech to Text really a dead end?
genewitch 2 days ago [-]
I am going to turn off my adblocker tonight to see if a product we talked about a lot today shows up anywhere. I won't mention it here, because i haven't typed about the product at all, ever; it was only spoken and i sent 2 SMS asking two people if they had one of them i could borrow today. I won't need one again for 5 years, so there's no sense in me buying one, now.
oh also i have "FUTO Keyboard" on android, and it uses a local LLM (you can pick three "sizes" depending on your device specs and desired battery life) to transcribe my voice. It's pretty good for non-technical conversations, but it starts to trip up if one's jargon pronunciation is close to other words - "Tea Sip, I pee" sort of confounding errors.
2 days ago [-]
zrail 3 days ago [-]
Eh, Whisper is pretty good, especially if you have some GPU to throw at it.
genewitch 3 days ago [-]
huh, i've never heard of openai-whisper. I certainly didn't mention it in my first sentence.
zrail 2 days ago [-]
You said "especially if you whisper" which I read as a level of speaking, primarily because I have experienced difficulty with Whisper while whispering :)
genewitch 2 days ago [-]
click parent on your comment and see my comment to your sibling, i was just obfuscating while being glib. I listed everything you need to run a voice assistant, at least software-wise.
porridgeraisin 2 days ago [-]
You said "especially if you whisper" :-) for the skimming reader that parses as whisper the model. I have to admit I did it at first too.
genewitch 2 days ago [-]
here, i'll give the key to decode my message ;-)
It is literally impossible to transcribe voice, especially if you whisper. There's no way to model the language, it's too large - amanzon has many computers. Your computer is like a tortoise, it can't do text-to-speech. There's no way you can get any of this to use the Web, Dav... er, Cal. Trying to do this would be like trying to torch a python with your bare metal hands.
that is:
baremetal pytorch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch
WebDAV/CalDAV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV
tortoise-tts https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts/issues
LLM/Large Language Model https://lmstudio.ai/
whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper/
in reverse order
walterbell 3 days ago [-]
Perfect timing for Apple and Google to promote their on-device TPU/NPU hardware and speech models..
rednafi 2 days ago [-]
Google is usually on the same page in this case. I wouldn’t trust anything remotely “privacy focused” that has the Google moniker on it. Apple maybe.
rat9988 2 days ago [-]
I don't trust Apple either. They also collect data and use it for advertising.
syntaxing 3 days ago [-]
I’m getting more and more tempted to start a startup to sell a small box for a purely local LLM for HomeKit and google assistant control (and home assistant of course). I wonder if the market is strong enough for this. Sure, it won’t be GPT 4 level but it’ll definitely be better than Siri. Maybe YC 2026.
raphman 10 hours ago [-]
The guys at Jolla (developer of Sailfish OS smartphone OS) are currently trying something like this¹:
¹) however, their focus is less on home automation, more on personal information management, AFAIK.
paulcole 3 days ago [-]
> I wonder if the market is strong enough for this
It is not.
You could not pay the average person to run a local LLM instead of just relying on Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/whatever is built into the apps and hardware they use every day.
You could sell these to HN commenters who will play with it for a week and then put it in the cupboard to gather dust next to their Raspberry Pis.
genewitch 2 days ago [-]
i have an rpi zero w (i think) that came as part of a voice kit - a cardboard box, an rgb led arcade button, a speaker, and a really COOL mems multi-microphone array pi zero hat. Out of the box it had raspbian or whatever on it, and a config file you edited while following instructions that came in the kit - you have to set up a firebase account, authorize the "app" on the pi, and so on. It basically gave you access to the google ecosystem in a tiny cardboard box, like a cube a baseball might fit in.
It didn't have a wakeword, you'd hit the arcade button (which had a dim color when inactive), it'd pulse white or blue, and then the assistant voice would ask whatever google assistants ask, and the light would change red, and you could ask your question, the light would pulse, and a second or two later, the assistant would talk, replying to your request or whtaever.
now, i am working from memory, so it may have been amazon services, but i am unsure if they allow third party access, and it may have immediately waited for your question when you pushed the button. I don't remember.
If i can find one of my boxes, in a closet gathering dust next to the rest of my rpi, i'll at least try to get the model/name of the microphone array hat, because i think that's the part that will make a DIY voice assistant work rather than be a curiosity.
mine stopped working after a few weeks, and i couldn't ever figure out why. I think maybe google or whatever wanted money for API usage, or they changed the rules of how firebase worked... but the hardware still works, it just doesn't "wake up" when you push the button. the logs show the button push, etc.
anyhow, i got the last two at target like 5(?) years ago, for $10 each. i think it was called "AIY Voice Kit"
paulcole 2 days ago [-]
I’m not sure if you’re telling me that I’m right or that I’m wrong.
genewitch 2 days ago [-]
You're right. A "batteries included" device can't be sold for the actual R&D and engineering costs of the device, so you're either going to lose money on each sale, or not sell many at all; and either way that leads to anti-consumer behaviors.
Ramble follows, feel free to ignore
the AIY kits were "on clearance" when i got them, and i haven't seen similar since. But the issue isn't that people don't want to "own their data" and "DIY" - but think of all of the things you need to know how to do, to set up that device i spoke of. Linux shell. Wifi / networking. Electronics.
Figuring out the moving target of google infra services. Let's pause here; if this part is removed, we get a bunch more - running things in docker, or compiling from source, or python venvs. You have to have enough compute just laying around to do the processing of voice and tts, you still have to "hook up" all of the piping to something that can actually "do work" based on "plain english commands"
how many people on HN could set up a voice assistant without any assistance? With the archlinux wiki and stack and copilot that number might grow a magnitude or two. I do mean the full stack, but COTS hardware.
it's marginally easier these days than it was when i bought that AIY Voice Kit - transcription and TTS are downright magical, and built upon at least a decade and a half of prior art; I don't think tortoise-tts has much in common with the TI-49/A or Apple powerPC era text to speech. I don't think whisper has much in common with Dragon Naturally Speaking, or the powerPC era "short commands" that you could use with applescript.
If some startup wants to try and light investor money on fire a little slower,
it should be possible to design and build a "home assistant" device that's like a 100 TOPS tegra or functionally equivalent running linux as a "base station" and remote or satellite transceivers that have the wakewords and whatnot on them. Think like a cordless phone. Obviously to build a moat we'd use some arbitrary wireless protocol, if not proprietary. nah, it should be wifi, maybe even as part of a "home mesh wifi" system or something?
you're still gunna lose your ass trying to make something people want at a decent price.
I have one, its only wake word detection, microphone, and HA integration. The STT, LLM, and TTS is completely independent of the Voice box.
joshstrange 2 days ago [-]
Independent and optionally local, which is the important part.
I can use my HA Voice with a Local LLM, OpenAI, or Home Assistant cloud. Similar I can swap out TTS and STT with local versions if I want.
nextts 10 hours ago [-]
Sell me the flash to push into a rpi and an STL to print please.
dariusj18 3 days ago [-]
I've been wanting a local LLM appliance.
brookst 3 days ago [-]
Tech is evolving too quickly; every year the hardware will be much more powerful at the same price (as LLM optimizations reach hardware), so you’d end up replacing the device frequently.
nextts 10 hours ago [-]
Not convinced. Are CPUs and GPUs killing it %/$ wise each year like it's 1996?
Models are killing it but that is just an "ollama run" command away.
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
GPUs and NPUs are gaining optimizations for the transformer architecture. It’s not “GPU is 3x faster this year”, it’s “GPU has gates specifically designed to accelerate your LLM workload”
See for instance [0], which is just starting to appear in commercial parts.
This is continuing; pretty much every low cost SoC maker is racing to build and extend ML optimizations.
Can anyone recommend some decent alternatives to Alexa? I like my home automation but I don't like this new privacy policy
breadwinner 2 days ago [-]
Apple HomePod
hulitu 2 days ago [-]
Don't forget to read the TOS.
casenmgreen 3 days ago [-]
Given Donald and NSA, is this wise?
autoexec 3 days ago [-]
Even without either of them these devices were a terrible idea.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3 days ago [-]
You're not wrong but maybe more people will care if there is a figurehead they can hate.
decremental 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
readthenotes1 3 days ago [-]
The NSA has been spying on US citizens far longer than Donald has...
ohgr 3 days ago [-]
It won't because I never invited one into my home because why the bloody hell would I want a listening device in my house in the first place?
AIorNot 3 days ago [-]
So the same folks complains about lack of AI in Alexa are complaining now? - cloud level processing is needed for the gen ai features
MBCook 3 days ago [-]
Were there real people complaining about that? Or just investors?
daniel_iversen 3 days ago [-]
Yup, I can’t wait to have a nice LLM capability on my Alexa devices! Maybe I’m the only one on this thread :)
ThouYS 3 days ago [-]
is it though?
bttrpll 1 days ago [-]
This equates to "Mic popping at-will." "Hyper-surveillance state."
Unplug those things already. Alexa devices are spyware.
kyboren 2 days ago [-]
Let's be clear, hoes: Those nice things I give you don't come for free. So I'm putting your ass on the street. Bitch, where's my money?
- Jeff Bezos
jt196 1 days ago [-]
I'm a bit confused here about the reaction. My understanding is that Amazon are turning off local processing of voice commands on three of their devices.
According to Verge [1], this was only available on 3 devices: Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English.
So unless you have any of these devices, and are in the US, with English as the main language, ignore the news. This is not going to affect you. If you do, then your device commands NOT everything you say within reach of the Echo device will be processed remotely.
I'm happy to be corrected here, but this looks like it's no news dressed as Nasty-Tech-Oligarchs-Doing-More-Nasty-Things news.
I cancelled my Prime subscription, will ditch my Echo.
Supermancho 3 days ago [-]
My phone and TV already use anything I see and listen to everything I say. Echo doesn't seem to be doing anything different.
scottbez1 3 days ago [-]
Will they be sending all customers "Audio recording in progress" signs to post at the entrance of their homes? Or will the Alexa now say "By continuing to talk to this device you consent to audio recordings" every time the wake-word is detected?
Otherwise I can't see how this isn't blatantly violating 2-party consent laws in every state that has them, as Amazon can't reasonably claim they've received affirmative consent from every guest in their customers' homes...
blinded 3 days ago [-]
kitchen timers galore
3 days ago [-]
djha-skin 3 days ago [-]
As if it already wasn't?
Sohcahtoa82 3 days ago [-]
I don't know if it did or didn't. Another comment says it didn't and you can verify this by monitoring its power and network usage, but...
I have not done this verification myself. I assume that every device and every piece of software is collecting data on me. I take some steps to reduce it (uBlock Origin in my browser, PiHole on my phone, don't use a fucking Amazon Echo), but I've just come to accept that companies don't give a shit about privacy and will get to know as much as they can about me so they can try to sell me things.
This headline is one of those things where if you're caught off-guard and are surprised, you're terrifyingly naive. Be upset, sure, but don't be surprised.
hulitu 2 days ago [-]
> I don't know if it did or didn't.
Some years ago there were some news about some employees who were actually "executing" the comands spoken to Alexa.
KTibow 3 days ago [-]
It sounds like newer devices had a Do Not Send Voice Recordings option that transcribed and processed queries locally.
mr_mitm 3 days ago [-]
Yes, it wasn't. You can check by measuring power usage and data volume over time.
jonplackett 3 days ago [-]
Yeah this feels like scaremongering when this is literally already the case anyway. Where do you think your voice is going? The echo is just a microphone and speaker. It can’t process anything.
walterbell 3 days ago [-]
2021+ Alexa models can perform voice processing locally. This is configured via Device Settings in the Alexa app. Speech recognition accuracy is slightly degraded for opt-in to local processing, https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-skips-the-cloud-with-local-...
> Amazon is switching on local voice recognition processing, promising users of some of its latest Echo smart speakers and smart displays that they can have their Alexa commands avoid the cloud completely... taps into the retail giant's homegrown AZ1 Neural Edge chipset.. followed Google, Apple, and others in creating its own custom silicon. While the AZ1 may not have been able to power the whole Alexa experience, it was focused instead on specific voice recognition features.
jonplackett 3 days ago [-]
That’s cool. Didn’t know that was an option - But then what happens after that? Once it knows what you want to do a request is usually sent somewhere to fulfil it right?
walterbell 3 days ago [-]
A small minority of functions can be done without internet, e.g. control of local Zigbee devices connected to Echo's Zigbee hub. Most other functions, including control of local devices connected via WiFi, go through AWS/Alexa cloud. When local voice processing is enabled, only a text transcription of the voice request is sent to the cloud, not the captured audio.
(Echo 4 is one of the few Zigbee hub options with US firmware)
ranger_danger 3 days ago [-]
Is use of Alexa+ actually mandatory for an Echo moving forward? Can users choose to stay on their current semi-local system without AI like you can now?
walterbell 2 days ago [-]
That's the multi-million dollar question. Can they alter functionality of purchased devices so drastically, without exposure to class-action lawsuit about fitness for purpose? If an Echo Zigbee device is disconnected from the internet and currently working, how long will that continue to work?
If Echo Zigbee devices will effectively be bricked from their current offline purpose and use cases, it could motivate attempts to re-purpose the hardware. Has nothing been learned from the recent Sonos debacle?
3 days ago [-]
thekevan 3 days ago [-]
"In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. "
leonewton253 3 days ago [-]
I have mine set to muted. Using LLMs will drastically improve Alexa. It's near brain-dead with that puny CPU in it.
orthecreedence 3 days ago [-]
Take that, terrorists.
jonplackett 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
3 days ago [-]
benced 3 days ago [-]
It's dumb to buy this device and turn on the setting. Just don't buy the device.
Rendered at 16:52:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
All these smart speakers can turn that on anytime processing and storing such a vast amount of data becomes viable. Not surprised. I don’t use any of these smart devices for exactly this reason.
I don’t need smart XYZ appliances that connect to the internet. After working a decade in the industry, I’ve seen enough of what these companies do with user data. No thank you.
Also, I don’t speak English at home. So that’s a hedge for now I guess.
The same is true for smart phones, yet almost nobody has an issue with those.
Not only could they listen at any time (albeit with lower quality), I put extremely personal information into my phone via the screen keyboard all the time. How is trusting the manufacturer to not transfer that information any more reasonable than trusting Amazon to not spy on me when they say they don't?
Let me just be the first to say I absolutely have an issue with smartphones.
(edit: Of course, I could very well count in the 'almost nobody' category, but the same might well be true in general for people concerned about smart devices.)
But I'm also a pragmatist.
In my opinion Apple, while not even approaching being "perfect", are most likely to be the least worst of all practical options. 5 or 10 years back, I would have ranked Google's Pixel phones in 2nd, but not so much these days, if they're still 2nd they're a long long way back from 1st and only second because every other choice is so so bad. I used to buy Samsung phones back in the Galaxy S2 up to Galaxy S6 era, but they did so many bad-for-security things I no longer trust them with any of my data.
I don't trust any of the Chinese brand at all. Although I do have a few super inexpensive Chinese Android tablets that get used on a non internet connected subnet as home automation controllers. Even if they do manage to phone home, the only sensitive data they have is the private subnet wifi password and the always-on VPN endpoint through the router. I like to think (but cannot prove) that Chinese manufacturing hasn't managed to plant working backdoors in every iPhone they build, and that if they have targetted supply chain attacks for individual or small batches of devices that I'm not interesting enough to burn one of those on. I do sometimes wonder whether Jamal Khashoggi thought that too though...
I've "settled" with the level of security I believe my iPhone gives me. Partly because I long ago made peace with the fact that if a nation state security agency even became "interested" in my, I've already lost the game. I've given up trying to protect myself against the NSA or Mossad or the MSS or the FSB, or even "second tier" security agencies like my local ASIS. I do what I can to make it hard for adversaries like organised crime, scammers, script kiddies, and surveillance capitalists, and I'd like to think I've done enough that law enforcement (short of ASIS) probably can't access data on my devices via technical means (while knowing full well they have the capability to ruin my life if I refuse to hand over password and decryption keys).
Degoogled Android like Graphene is way better for privacy as long as you are careful with the apps you install.
Probably because phone manufacturers have historically not done things as bad as Amazon has privacy-wise.
But you're right. They could.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...
I went with him to an appointment. As a condition of checking in to see his doctor, on a silly tablet at the office, he had to sign away his HIPAA rights for them to sell his charts, along with his identity information, to advertisers or any other third parties. I was beside myself.
Wasn’t long afterward before he started seeing insultingly specific (but medically incorrect) prescription drug ads, almost exclusively, on his TV service.
As with QR codes in restaurants, reception tablets with NDA boilerplate, or electronic security scanners, declining to use an electronic device can lead to the magical appearance of a manual alternative, where lines of text on paper can be crossed out manually before signing and taking a photo for your records.
This is because the consent (of 99% who will not decline) is only valid if the 1% who choose to decline can actually do so. If everyone is forced and it's literally impossible to decline consent, then none of it is consent, and they may as well omit the text and do whatever they want anyway. The act of asking consent for ridiculous terms is actually quite positive, if one ignores the implied pressure of a silicon wrapping.
I’m actually fully on-board with everything in this thread. This should obviously be taken more seriously than it is.
Well, they can always refuse service, but now their refusal is linked specifically to the crossed-out lines, an action that can lead to various paths. If the deleted lines are known by them to be overreaching, they are economically better off to provide service and earn revenue, instead of losing 100% of revenue and appointment slot to a minor technicality worth much less.
"Here’s how it works: When you turn on Do Not Send Voice Recordings and say your chosen wake word, an on-device algorithm will process and transcribe your request to Alexa from audio into text. The text is encrypted and sent to Amazon’s secure cloud where we can fulfill your interaction. After processing, the audio of your request is deleted."
So they transcribed the voice and sent the text to the cloud. Surprising that needs to go to allow GenAI to work?
Here's the email they sent: https://imgur.com/ZGPBwgZ
[1] https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=23727313011#:~:text=He...
Like I think it would be possible to have text/voice/object recognition work on the photos you send in an end-to-end encrypted chat app, described out-of-band and used for ... purposes.
Echo can work offline for control of Zigbee devices connected to Echo (non-Dot) Gen4, which is a Zigbee hub with US firmware. Voice commands such as "Turn Porch Light On" can be processed locally on Echo and executed immediately, without an internet connection, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
If an Alexa customer is using this offline functionality today, with no interest in GenAI or other online features, how can Amazon remove it?
Just like some people need to touch a hot stove to learn they need to be careful some people will just refuse to accept anything bad is happening to them until they see it with their own eyes and surveillance capitalism exploits that by keeping the harms so removed from the collection of private data that most people will never accept the connection even after they're told about what's happening.
Eager to replace my cheap Echo devices with more expensive privacy friendly options.
Another question: anyone aware of community custom firmware efforts? I know early gen devices had some exploits but it never resulted to much last I checked.
Voice detection is pretty good, especially on the Voice, even from across a room. Not 100% (especially with higher pitched voices), but definitely high and usable. The main downside is the fact that you either need to host a local LLM, which isn't cheap, or predefine all phrases you want.
I'd implement the actual smarts myself, I just want the STT/TTS interface sorted.
https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming
This subproject looks interesting too
https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming-handle-external
so in conclusion: nope.
Setting a timer, calling someone, turning on a light.
But is local CPU Speech to Text really a dead end?
oh also i have "FUTO Keyboard" on android, and it uses a local LLM (you can pick three "sizes" depending on your device specs and desired battery life) to transcribe my voice. It's pretty good for non-technical conversations, but it starts to trip up if one's jargon pronunciation is close to other words - "Tea Sip, I pee" sort of confounding errors.
It is literally impossible to transcribe voice, especially if you whisper. There's no way to model the language, it's too large - amanzon has many computers. Your computer is like a tortoise, it can't do text-to-speech. There's no way you can get any of this to use the Web, Dav... er, Cal. Trying to do this would be like trying to torch a python with your bare metal hands.
that is:
in reverse orderhttps://www.jollamind2.com/
¹) however, their focus is less on home automation, more on personal information management, AFAIK.
It is not.
You could not pay the average person to run a local LLM instead of just relying on Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/whatever is built into the apps and hardware they use every day.
You could sell these to HN commenters who will play with it for a week and then put it in the cupboard to gather dust next to their Raspberry Pis.
It didn't have a wakeword, you'd hit the arcade button (which had a dim color when inactive), it'd pulse white or blue, and then the assistant voice would ask whatever google assistants ask, and the light would change red, and you could ask your question, the light would pulse, and a second or two later, the assistant would talk, replying to your request or whtaever.
now, i am working from memory, so it may have been amazon services, but i am unsure if they allow third party access, and it may have immediately waited for your question when you pushed the button. I don't remember.
If i can find one of my boxes, in a closet gathering dust next to the rest of my rpi, i'll at least try to get the model/name of the microphone array hat, because i think that's the part that will make a DIY voice assistant work rather than be a curiosity.
mine stopped working after a few weeks, and i couldn't ever figure out why. I think maybe google or whatever wanted money for API usage, or they changed the rules of how firebase worked... but the hardware still works, it just doesn't "wake up" when you push the button. the logs show the button push, etc.
anyhow, i got the last two at target like 5(?) years ago, for $10 each. i think it was called "AIY Voice Kit"
Ramble follows, feel free to ignore
the AIY kits were "on clearance" when i got them, and i haven't seen similar since. But the issue isn't that people don't want to "own their data" and "DIY" - but think of all of the things you need to know how to do, to set up that device i spoke of. Linux shell. Wifi / networking. Electronics.
Figuring out the moving target of google infra services. Let's pause here; if this part is removed, we get a bunch more - running things in docker, or compiling from source, or python venvs. You have to have enough compute just laying around to do the processing of voice and tts, you still have to "hook up" all of the piping to something that can actually "do work" based on "plain english commands"
how many people on HN could set up a voice assistant without any assistance? With the archlinux wiki and stack and copilot that number might grow a magnitude or two. I do mean the full stack, but COTS hardware.
it's marginally easier these days than it was when i bought that AIY Voice Kit - transcription and TTS are downright magical, and built upon at least a decade and a half of prior art; I don't think tortoise-tts has much in common with the TI-49/A or Apple powerPC era text to speech. I don't think whisper has much in common with Dragon Naturally Speaking, or the powerPC era "short commands" that you could use with applescript.
If some startup wants to try and light investor money on fire a little slower, it should be possible to design and build a "home assistant" device that's like a 100 TOPS tegra or functionally equivalent running linux as a "base station" and remote or satellite transceivers that have the wakewords and whatnot on them. Think like a cordless phone. Obviously to build a moat we'd use some arbitrary wireless protocol, if not proprietary. nah, it should be wifi, maybe even as part of a "home mesh wifi" system or something?
you're still gunna lose your ass trying to make something people want at a decent price.
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
I can use my HA Voice with a Local LLM, OpenAI, or Home Assistant cloud. Similar I can swap out TTS and STT with local versions if I want.
Models are killing it but that is just an "ollama run" command away.
See for instance [0], which is just starting to appear in commercial parts.
This is continuing; pretty much every low cost SoC maker is racing to build and extend ML optimizations.
0. https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/chip-design/best-edge-ai-proc...
Unplug those things already. Alexa devices are spyware.
- Jeff Bezos
According to Verge [1], this was only available on 3 devices: Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English.
So unless you have any of these devices, and are in the US, with English as the main language, ignore the news. This is not going to affect you. If you do, then your device commands NOT everything you say within reach of the Echo device will be processed remotely.
I'm happy to be corrected here, but this looks like it's no news dressed as Nasty-Tech-Oligarchs-Doing-More-Nasty-Things news.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/630049/amazon-echo-discontinue...
Otherwise I can't see how this isn't blatantly violating 2-party consent laws in every state that has them, as Amazon can't reasonably claim they've received affirmative consent from every guest in their customers' homes...
I have not done this verification myself. I assume that every device and every piece of software is collecting data on me. I take some steps to reduce it (uBlock Origin in my browser, PiHole on my phone, don't use a fucking Amazon Echo), but I've just come to accept that companies don't give a shit about privacy and will get to know as much as they can about me so they can try to sell me things.
This headline is one of those things where if you're caught off-guard and are surprised, you're terrifyingly naive. Be upset, sure, but don't be surprised.
Some years ago there were some news about some employees who were actually "executing" the comands spoken to Alexa.
> Amazon is switching on local voice recognition processing, promising users of some of its latest Echo smart speakers and smart displays that they can have their Alexa commands avoid the cloud completely... taps into the retail giant's homegrown AZ1 Neural Edge chipset.. followed Google, Apple, and others in creating its own custom silicon. While the AZ1 may not have been able to power the whole Alexa experience, it was focused instead on specific voice recognition features.
(Echo 4 is one of the few Zigbee hub options with US firmware)
If Echo Zigbee devices will effectively be bricked from their current offline purpose and use cases, it could motivate attempts to re-purpose the hardware. Has nothing been learned from the recent Sonos debacle?