What if you want to issue a voice command away from home?
Uh, the Google Assistant in the Pixel phone is exact same thing the Google Home has. Pretty soon every phone (including iPhones) will have Google Assistant.
In fact the system is really advanced in that if you have more than Google Assistant device around you the one closest to you will answer the query, and each of them communicate with the Home to relay commands when you are away from home or in another room.
Yes. Information isn't being recorded...it's only being processed when a keyword activates the connection, and after that it only stays active for a few seconds.
If they wanted to record everything you said, the amount of data would be too large to handle...not to mention turning all of that metadata into something usable. There wouldn't be enough payoff to have someone listen to millions of people all the time.
Unless you're looking for something very specific from a specific group, that's still way too much data to handle for a marketing payoff. The NSA does things like this on a group of people that have raised flags, and even then the amount of data they have to sort through is incredible.
People get this image of a guy in a datacenter with a wall of monitors watching and listening to everything you do. This COULD happen if it involved 10, 50, even 100 people. For MILLIONS though, it would be very unwieldy. You'd spend more on the huge data center to handle all of that data than you would gain in ultra-directed marketing based on conversation.
Yes. Information isn't being recorded...it's only being processed when a keyword activates the connection, and after that it only stays active for a few seconds.
If they wanted to record everything you said, the amount of data would be too large to handle...not to mention turning all of that metadata into something usable. There wouldn't be enough payoff to have someone listen to millions of people all the time.
Yes. Information isn't being recorded...
The recordings are streamed and stored remotely, and can be reviewed or deleted over time, Amazon says.
not according to Amazon.
Cops want recordings for murder case.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/28/tech/amazon-echo-alexa-bentonville-arkansas-murder-case-trnd/
You probably want to give the documentary, CitizenFour a watch.
No, it doesn't record without the wake word. You need the full quote:
"According to Amazon, Echo works by constantly listening for the "wake word" -- "Alexa" or "Amazon," by default -- and then records your voice and transfers it to a processor for analysis so that it can fulfill requests or answer questions. The recordings are streamed and stored remotely, and can be reviewed or deleted over time, Amazon says."
Amazon’s Echo (and its main competitor, the Google Home) works by passively recording everything you say. None of this information is actually sent to Amazon. Think of it more like taking notes in class — as if you’re listening but not writing anything down until your professor actually says something important. But when the Echo hears “Alexa” (or whatever your activation phrase is), it begins to actively record. That snippet of speech is then sent to Amazon’s cloud servers, where your recorded message is run through a speech-recognition neural network and a response is sent back to you, whether that’s playing a song on Spotify or giving you the weather forecast.
Amazon keeps all of the recordings of you asking Alexa to play WNYC or of you setting a timer for 20 minutes. You can jump into the Alexa companion app and hear all of your requests again if you want to see just how bored you sound when talking to your home voice robot. Sure, it’s slightly creepy — but Amazon also tracks pretty much every move you make while you’re online shopping as well.
Court records show that Amazon twice declined to turn the actual voice-search queries over to the local police, though it also did not comment to the Information about the case in question. For what it’s worth, anecdotally, I’ve heard from a professor who works in voice research that Amazon deletes all voice data after six months — but Amazon has no stated policy about how long it holds onto that data. Still, if any of this has you feeling uneasy about your Amazon Echo, you can always head to amazon.com/myx, find your Echo, and delete out all of your old voice recordings.
In the above case, police confiscated the Echo itself and attempted to extract data from it, but it’s unclear how much they could get — the Echo itself doesn’t have much of a hard drive and almost no information is stored locally on it.
yea i know. but i had to do a few Blackhat seminars last year and devices like this creep me out. Yes my paranoid factor was raised quite a bit after those seminars.
I love gadgets, but i dont think ill have one of these gadgets in my home anytime soon.
I'd rather implement something like this myself with a Raspberry PI or something and know it's not spying on me. Whenever I decide to overhaul my home automation system so it's more modular and expandable, I may look into what kind of Linux libraries are available to code a Siri/Alexa etc like program. As far as controlling stuff around the house go it would actually be fairly simple, provided there is such library that makes it easy to actually recognize the voice. That is the part that is really the most advanced. If you can end up with text strings of speech then it's just the thing of parsing it out and processing it.
Do these things typically distinct between different people's voices? Would be cool if it actually did accurately and you can set different accesses based on the person. Except if you get a cold then it won't authorize anything you ask it to do lol.
"I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
yea i know. but i had to do a few Blackhat seminars last year and devices like this creep me out. Yes my paranoid factor was raised quite a bit after those seminars.
I love gadgets, but i dont think ill have one of these gadgets in my home anytime soon.
I'm always paranoid about these type of devices after I read up on a few Blackhat things. What I do find more disturbing is some friends who were so vocal about the Kinnect listening to turn itself on were having the same discussion on which one of these to get. While I get that MS has a very sketchy track record, it blows my mind how people are flipping the script for these devices. Somehow it's now OK, even though these devices are doing the same thing.
The super scary one is the backdoor in Intel and AMD CPUs. This runs at a very low level and can pretty much access anything in your computer even if it's behind a firewall. Heck even if it's not plugged into the internet, as it has a 3G backup radio.
Link?
What's scary is the fact that most people have the "nothing to hide" mentality. Everything these days is trying to spy on us, whether it's physical spying such as voice and video, or more virtual spying such as what you do online. It's sickening that people think this is ok. There should be riots over this stuff. Privacy should be a right.
The super scary one is the backdoor in Intel and AMD CPUs. This runs at a very low level and can pretty much access anything in your computer even if it's behind a firewall. Heck even if it's not plugged into the internet, as it has a 3G backup radio.
What's scary is the fact that most people have the "nothing to hide" mentality. Everything these days is trying to spy on us, whether it's physical spying such as voice and video, or more virtual spying such as what you do online. It's sickening that people think this is ok. There should be riots over this stuff. Privacy should be a right.
The super scary one is the backdoor in Intel and AMD CPUs. This runs at a very low level and can pretty much access anything in your computer even if it's behind a firewall. Heck even if it's not plugged into the internet, as it has a 3G backup radio.
If you're paranoid, you shouldn't be interested in any of them...