- it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good.
- it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would be much more socially pleasant.
- it can stream music without the hassle of bluetooth. Bluetooth streaming becomes less convenient when you don't know which of the many computers, phones or tablets were used to start the music, or where it is...
- my three year old can probably figure out how to use it
Thought I'd throw those out there, and start a "positive" thread. This discussion is overwhelmingly negative. Lots of good points being made in the negative comments, but there are some nice positives, too.
> - it can answer questions at the dinner table...
that would be my biggest use for it, well that and as a speaker I guess. I really hope that I can swap out "Alexa" for the word "Computer" so I could feel like I'm one step closer to Star Trek
I sincerely wonder about the effect of offloading so much of our "brainwork" to computers. No one remembers phone numbers or tries to navigate without GPS, and increasingly we depend on accesss to information so there's less practice with storage and recall.
What brain/neuron plasticity tells us is that our brains literally reallocate unused neurons for other tasks. So, on the one hand, a positive theory might have it that offloading more mundane tasks would free our brains for higher order thinking and creativity, etc.
But, it seems that we are instead finding more ways to distract ourselves with less meaningful "leisure" activity.
I don't know that we will literally start getting dumber, but it's hard to know whether we are headed in a good direction as the future gets closer to the now.
This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc. The missing step is that these changes are actually optimisations because information really has become easier to access. If we were about to get transported to a pre-internet civilisation, then we would have cause to worry, but since we strongly expect to have access to computers and the internet for the rest of our lives, it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things.
We are getting worse at things that used to be considered 'smart' -- like information retention -- but we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now even than very smart people did in the 20th century.
>This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc
One difference is that technology is replacing more and more of what we one might consider "mundane", but really involves higher order thinking that is important for creativity, critical-thinking, problem-solving, etc. For instance, the ability to draw from a broad swath of stored, assimilated, and well-understood information is a critical element of problem-solving and finding creative solutions.
Because functional intelligence to a large degree involves drawing on information and experiences to assemble solutions. This requires a "working set" from which to draw. It is not enough to simply look things up, because you don't know what to look up.
And, in general, what computers do for us that, say, simply printing or other older "technology" didn't supplant includes executive functioning (e.g. algorithmic tasks like mapping directions, etc.) Beyond simple information retrieval, computers actually solve problems for us. In fact, it's so different from something like printing that I am not sure I understand your analogy.
>we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now
Sounds intuitive, but I am not sure we have evidence for this. Ironically, though, computers are better at using information.
>it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things
I mentioned that this could be one theoretical upshot but, in general, I think our culture is going in the opposite direction with a tendency towards mindless distraction. Exclude tech people and reconsider your statement.
Xbox and google now do the same thing. As I understand it all the sound is filtered locally for the keyword. If it's detected, then it starts recording and sends the audio to a server to be processed.
While we're being positive, I absolutely do not think Amazon would be stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot sending all recorded data up to the cloud. I'm certain that within a few hours of release, someone will have a network monitor hooked up. Their findings will be widely known almost immediately, and this thing would be dead in the water if they were sending everything up. They know this already.
There's no way this thing has the power to do adequate voice recognition on device for arbitray speakers and queries, even given a limited domain. It's sending everything to Amazon for processing. The only thing it probably recognizes by itself is "Alexa."
Right, so it sends the commands that you give it only after it recognizes a pre-programmed word. It will likely not send up casual conversation surrounding the command, as there would not be a non-nefarious reason to do that.
False positives... But yeah they're probably rare. The real risk is that it could be hacked or national security lettered to listen permanently. The FBI has form in this regard.
I'm guessing it's Android under the covers, and I believe that Google voice recognition is now processed on the device - so it might well be powerful enough to do the voice recognition without the cloud.
Doesn't mean the NSA or Chinese equivalent won't figure out how to hack Echo to plant a little piece of stealthware on it that records all conversations of suspects in "terrorism related" investigations. Such stealthware might get detected once or twice (though not often-- it won't be ubiquitous), but such detections will easily covered up by forcing Amazon to announce a rare and obscure firmware bug backstory. Actually, come to think of it, with proper contextual targeting, such stealthware wouldn't even need to send full conversations. Just wait for detection of "the meeting" or "the rally" and boom spend off all the info you need to effectively disrupt pro-democracy rallies in Hong Kong.
This very likely uses network speech recognition, so most things (except for the wake-up word) are being streamed up and recognized in Amazon's data center (Siri, SVoice, etc all do this also)
Edit: I missed this: "Plus, Echo is Bluetooth-enabled so you can stream your favorite music services like Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora from your phone or tablet," which obsoletes some of the below. The point on monophonic audio still stands.
Out of curiosity, are you already embedded in the amazon cloud music ecosystem? I'm one of those luddites who still has a library of mp3s—I don't want to have to figure out what I can or can't get on some compatible streaming service here. That would be a lovely feature—if it had an aux-in port or bluetooth compatibility so I could still use it as a dumb speaker. Smart TV's still have inputs, e.g.
Additionally, if I'm not mistaken, it's monophone? Dual-driver, but only one "360-degree" channel of some sort?
I am also a "library of mp3 luddites", and to me it sounds as though the Echo can do any Bluetooth audio, like a modern head unit. So you might say, "Computer, play Bluetooth audio", or "Computer, skip this track," and it would work just like pressing play and skip in your car.
This may just be wishful thinking on my part, however.
Your three year old probably can't use it. Current voice recognition - Siri, kinect, et al - all seem to struggle with child voices. Maybe something they've expressly worked on for this 'home assistant' scenario, but I don't hold out much hope. It's a general pattern that early releases of human-interaction tech tend to optimize for 50th percentile western males.
When one of my daughters was 3 someone handed an iphone with one of those apps with an animal that repeats things back. She said something with the word "color" in it, but it came out "cala."
It repeated it back (incorrectly) and then she got stuck in a loop of saying "not cala, cala!" and it repeating it back, getting more frustrated each time.
I'm guessing that was Talking Tom (the cat). My 2 year old daughter has gotten into similar loops with it several times. Usually though, it's just along the lines of, "No, YOU!"
Children generally don't enunciate as clearly as adults. Their speech is more difficult for a computer (or a human who doesn't know the language well!) to understand.
I definitely agree. I'd use it mostly for a bluetooth music streaming speaker. And for $99 (since I'm a prime member) it's a good price. All the other features are extra and I don't know which ones I'd end up actually using on a regular basis. But it would be cool to try out.
This was my train of thought as well, but it ended in me researching mini bluetooth speakers and buying one of those instead. The features enabled by Echo are kind of cool and all, but I don't think I'd use them at all and the security stuff is obviously enough of a concern to make me think twice. It wonder why they didn't try to add a wifi kill-switch kind of thing for the paranoid who would just use it for a blue-tooth speaker
Rarely touched privacy? If somebody wanted to spy on me, they could use the microphone in my phone or my laptop, right? I almost never turn either of those off. Bringing Echo into my home doesn't give the NSA new opportunities, my phone is always in my pocket anyway. If I'm worried enough about Echo to avoid buying it, I should also get a laptop without a webcam and get rid of my cell phone.
I certainly am not using OK Google, as shouting at my dashboard whilst driving makes for a frustrating driving experience. It just never hears what I say correctly.
No, you must be joking. The burden of proof in an argument has to be borne by the one making the claim. If you claim you saw a UFO, the burden of proof is on you. The burden of proof does not fall on everyone else to prove that what you saw could NOT, in any way, shape, or form, possibly be a UFO.
It is established by now that various government agencies all over the world routinely monitor web traffic, tap phones and install trojans on computers. There is no doubt in my mind that an internet connected listening device would be exploited.
The only difference I see is that the battery of a smartphone would drain rapidly if it was constantly recording and uploading the recordings to the cloud. But you are right, a smartphone is a device used to monitor you and people whose freedom depends on that knowledge, like radical political activists are aware of that. And yes laptops are exploited. To give an example: The German government has developed a number of trojans for Windows over the years and the BKA routinely uses them for targeted surveillance.
You made the positive claim, you are the one who needs to provide evidence. Until you do, a rational mind is well justified in disbelieving your claim.
I attempted to start a positive comments thread earlier, yours seems to have done far better so I'm going to repost my thoughts here too:
I've requested an invite.
I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.
I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.
I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
This "internet-of-things" trend coincides
unfortunately with the "dragnet surveillance"
trend. With every new product launch from a
"cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm
reading the tombstone of modern society. The
selling point behind these devices is
convenience, but at the cost of security. I
don't think I need to explain to HN why an
always-on, internet connected voice recording
device is something to keep out of your house. [1]
Consumers are frighteningly amenable to reducing
their security in favor of convenience. Often
they are oblivious to the tradeoff altogether.
Evidence of this trend has increased since 9/11,
as increasingly paranoid legislation made its
way through congress at the behest of corporate
stakeholders. It should hardly be surprising that
now, with the NSA privileged enough to be openly
flaunting its surveillance, those same corporate
stakeholders are investing in companies that sell
listening devices to millions of Americans. I am
making a paranoid argument, but it's not ungrounded,
and certainly not surprising, because paranoia breeds
paranoia. Pass paranoid legislation, face a paranoid
populace. The American people are rightfully skeptical
of their government.
Perhaps it sounds absurd to segment the world into
the "populace" and "government," but did it sound
absurd when you read those terms in high school
history books? Over spans of centuries, politics is
viewed in the same terms: the people, and the
government. Maybe you and I do not think of ourselves
in the context of centuries. But what about Barack Obama? Vladimir Putin? It seems logical to assume they see themselves in the context of world leaders past. Modern leaders occupy unprecedented seats of power over the largest populace ever. If they are internally comparing themselves
to each other and their predecessors, then we have a problem. We cannot trust the world leaders, because they
do not view themselves on the same level as us. Faced with an increasingly empowered and growing populace, they could
react any way. We'll see.
(Yes, I'm trying to get on a list at the NSA. It's an
experiment I'm doing. Hopefully I hit enough keywords
today.)
[1] Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies
every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints?
You think governments don't have factory floor managers in
their pockets?
Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid. Some percentage of people will be unjustly exploited, but probably not enough to offset the economic benefits that technology like this brings to its users.
I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don't, just' just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that's not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you've opted for ideology over empiricism.
Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).
The internet of things isn't 'coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend'; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a 'world wide web' traversed by 'spiders' and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in at least the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.
> Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid.
Maybe you didn't mean it literally but it's a popular expression in this context. I don't think a desire for privacy is paranoid; it is normal, healthy behavior.
But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users. How many even know what "metadata" means, or how 'cloud' computing actually works? Go down to the mall (assuming you are not in a tech hub) and ask. On top of that, they would need to understand the confidentiality implications of the system, and then the political, social and other implications of confidentiality.
The public is not able to make an informed decision, and government and industry are taking advantage of that:
If people don't mind, why are so many of these practices kept secret or obscure?
I'm not saying a desire for privacy is paranoid, but the assumption that the government will engage in passive monitoring and archival of everything that can be captured through the microphone and use it as leverage later, even if it doesn't involve criminal liability, eg 'assist us without nefarious purpose or we will use something we recorded to cause you acute embarrassment with devastating social consequences.' I'm not saying this won't happen, but that it won't happen enough for most people to care.
But to address the gist of what you say, I think you assume an understanding of data security that is far beyond most end users.
I don't think I do. I've met plenty of non-technical people who worry about the possibility that their phone could record them when its swtiched off or suchlike - you don't need to understand how something functions in order to understand its potential as an instrumentality. But unless you have a fundamentally antagonist view of government (which most people in the US don't) then there's little overlap between the set of 'stuff the government could do me' and that of 'stuff that would advance the government's purpose' for the average person. This is what I mean when I say most people don't feel culpable enough; there isn't anything sufficiently illegal going on in their lives that they perceive a significant government interest in intruding upon them in the first place.
When I talk about paranoia I mean the idea that government is going to fuck with you no matter how blameless of a life you lead, and that the more blameless you are the less leverage you will have to push back against the inevitable intrusion. In other words, they overestimate the probability of oppression just as optimistic or authoritarian people may underestimate it, depending on context. While that possibility certainly exists, I think something like this Amazon product only marginally increases it because anyone who buys this probably already has a smartphone and keeps it close by at all times already.
> This is what I mean when I say most people don't feel culpable enough; there isn't anything sufficiently illegal going on in their lives that they perceive a significant government interest in intruding upon them in the first place.
I hear this refutation quite often. I find it typically comes from people in a place of privilege that the system largely ignores. I've read far too many accounts from people who are not Caucasian or are Muslim to believe that innocent people are not the targets of mass surveillance and do not notice its effects.
You're making my point for me. The system largely ignores a large majority of the people, who therefore don't care much about this issue to feel deterred from buying the relevant technology. Hence the enormous popularity of smartphones with GPS functionality and so forth: never getting lost >> government tracking everywhere you go, for most people.
"the more blameless you are the less leverage you will have to push back against the inevitable intrusion"
That's really well put. People seem to miss the fact that in a surveillance society it's not necessarily your privacy that you will most regret losing, it's the privacy of those groups you agree with who are opposed to some powerful faction.
>I don't think a desire for privacy is paranoid; it is normal, healthy behavior.
We on Hacker News spend our free time criticizing anyone we perceive as complicit in surveillance, bemoaning centralization, and championing Bitcoin and Uber for disrupting authority. To HN, a desire for privacy is literally normal: it is a social norm of this community.
That doesn't mean that people outside this community do (or should) care nearly as much as we do.
Keep in mind, within this community, there is a large portion of developers, and thus, more likely than the average person to be able to affect positive change through their work / side-projects. As such, it's a critical issue that I think HN is smart to not shy away from. The same systems that can gamify an action can be used oppressively. Thus, one has a varying degree of personal responsibility to what one builds or contributes to.
>That doesn't mean that people outside this community do (or should) care nearly as much as we do.
Part of the reason we care more is because we understand more.
But, in general, I think there is not nearly enough emphasis put on what's right vs. what people care about. That is, the former doesn't dictate the latter.
> I don't think a desire for privacy is paranoid; it is normal, healthy behavior.
I think it's healthy to choose how private you keep each aspect of your personal life. I make tradeoffs all the time. When I think that sharing some aspect of my personal life (whether with an individual or an organization) will give me more benefit than the cost of losing that privacy, I'll do it.
A normal, healthy behavior is to be aware of what the devices you own are capable of.
Insane paranoia is hearing "cloud-based audio processing device and service" and instantly jumping to "the NSA" absent a single damned fact to support that conclusion.
Insane paranoia is hearing "cloud-based audio processing device and service" and instantly jumping to "the NSA" absent a single damned fact to support that conclusion.
Cell phones are routinely used as listening devices, what makes you think this device would not be? If I were a government agency intent on omniscience (i.e. the NSA), this device, along with televisions and computers with always-on microphones controlled remotely, would be a very welcome development - all it takes is one secret order to the company concerned, with a warrant covering the entire country, and their entire product line is useful for surveillance on demand.
Given the world we live in, where GCHQ for example claims the right to capture all information, including privileged communications between lawyer and client, wondering about how our devices protect against government intrusion is not insane paranoia at all.
Yeah, but if anyone caught wind of it there would be hell to pay wouldn't there? You'd need some sort of secret court so that you could control exactly who has knowledge of what's going on and effectively subvert democracy. Good luck with that. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to believe the US would allow that kind of back room governing to go on.
>Cell phones are routinely used as listening devices //
Citation? I'm really interested, presumably there's a hacker convention talk or somesuch where they install a hidden service on a standard phone and upload all voice input even when the phone is off?
Clearly I use burner non-smart phones for my criminal activities (that's a joke!) so they're going to have to use other means. Obviously they can still sniff the data at the operator for phone calls.
Daniel Ellsberg [Pentagon Papers whistle-blower]: "Somebody told me that they can listen to what we're saying by my having this cellphone {waves what looks like iPhone} even though it's turned off."
William Binney [ex-NSA]: "Yes. [... goes off on a tangent about data analysis]
He doesn't really mention it. Indeed the vid is considering electronic communications and information which is put in to the public sphere. Other than that one question which Binney responds to only with "Yes" there's no other mention of private audio being covertly sniffed.
The BBC article is very sparse and jumps from being able to eavesdrop mobile->basestation and decrypt that to being able to listen in on all conversations within range of a phone. Clearly ludicrous.
I don't at all doubt that phones can be modified remotely to covertly listen and that some phones could enable this when switched off (though that seems unlikely to meet with normal design requirements, it seems that this covert listening would need to be designed in). I guess maybe you could make "off" only appear to be off whilst listening - my phone gets hot when doing anything extended like recording a talk or something and drains the battery quite a lot - even with the screen off. Seems that using this sort of surveillance on a widescale is highly unlikely.
>"all it takes is one secret order to the company concerned, with a warrant covering the entire country, and their entire product line is useful for surveillance on demand" [grey-area, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569217]
Only, IMO, if it's already been designed in and you can hide the power usage (and data-store usage).
Only, IMO, if it's already been designed in and you can hide the power usage (and data-store usage).
That quote was about this Amazon device anyway, which doesn't have power usage or data usage requirements that would be noticed by the average user if recording was only for significant audio. You've jumped from there to cell phones.
The access is blanket given warrants like the FISA verizon one, and there's nothing to stop targeted surveillance like that which we know goes on on gmail/skype/etc accounts when requested. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that cell phones or this device are all constantly recording what we do and transmitting direct to the NSA right now, but that they could in a targeted manner be used to do so if someone became of interest, and that this Amazon device would be a particularly powerful bug given the great microphones, constant power and fixed location in a home.
Re cell phones, I don't think it would be very hard to present a blank screen and wake up only on significant audio to record/broadcast on a hacked phone. I'm sure a paranoid user would eventually notice, but the capability is certainly there - probably that sort of thing is very rare and sophisticated, it's not something I worry about personally, but I do think it is quite possible. If you control the software on the device, I don't see why it seems impossible to you that you'd be able to control the phone completely and use it as an audio bug (except when battery removed etc). You wouldn't even have to rely on faking switch-off - the majority of people leave their phone on and carry it around.
Anything better?
Well, I'm inclined to believe Binney (and others) when they explicitly say cellphones are used as bugs, but here's another example for you of actual use, they are not hard to find:
I'm not suggesting that cell phones or this device are all constantly recording what we do and transmitting direct to the NSA right now
Thank you for the clarification, and I apologize if my tone earlier was excessively acerbic - the angle you just mentioned appears to be an undertone surrounding this discussion.
but that they could in a targeted manner be used to do so if someone became of interest
Here's where we diverge: This is an argument that can be applied to any internet-connected device, anywhere, anytime. We're dealing with a group of people that have proven themselves adept at twisting a device's programming to their own ends.
So: Why is this so special? Why are so many people sitting here in this thread slagging on this particular internet-connected mic when most of us carry one with us and work in front of one every single day?
I'm sure I'm not alone in growing weary of hearing the constant "NSA!!" bogeyman brought up anytime a new device featuring a microphone comes out. There's no new information here, no interesting discussion, just the same usual "X might do Y" scaremongering. With the previous paragraph in mind, these concerns ring hypocritical in addition to just hollow.
> Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid.
It's going to take a high-profile case to show people how wrong this is. Wait for it.
Here's some potential scenarios:
* An author who is researching dangerous-sounding stuff and discussing it with his friends for a book is SWAT teamed and shot dead. Later investigation reveals overzealous "parallel construction."
* Someone at one of these companies is busted insider trading on information from these sources. Surveillance targets include lawyers, CXO-level personnel, etc.
* Creepy misogynistic black-hat hackers break into the network behind one of these devices and start using it to engage in cyber-stalking against women and record their sexual encounters, posting the results to 4chan and Reddit.
* HIPAA or other similar regulations are spectacularly violated, resulting in large cash damages.
* Someone is busted pwning the "cloud-enhanced Internet of things" (surveillance) devices of police officers and selling feeds to drug traffickers and the mob.
Shit like this happens already and slightly less probable stuff is regularly dramatized on TV in mystery/suspense shows. Not only do many people not care as long as it happens to someone else, a sizable percentage of them derive entertainment from it (eg see news stories on people who commit suicide in response to internet bullying or similar).
It's very unlikely that there would be a single turning point case a la Pearl Harbor or 9-11. More likely it's an aggregation of small cases followed by slow adjustments in a different direction. As an example of the latter, consider how incarceration seems to have peaked in the US and we're seeing the beginnings of a fall as well as a shift away from incarceration as the default response. I would predict the fraction of the population that is incarcerated to fall by 10% in 10 years and by 50% in 25 years. Likewise we're seeing pushback against the militarization of police, but how that particular pendulum swings is going to be measured out over budgetary cycles rather than in real time. I think that if you were to plot utility vs security on a graph you'd see a random walk of incremental fluctuating changes rather than massive discontinuities.
Why can't privacy be enough reason by itself? There are plenty of legal things I want to keep private. The government does not need to have record of every little thing about me. Some things are personal.
I disagree; I think most people desire privacy. It's just that the speed of technology change has been faster than social awareness.
For instance, most people understand cameras - they've been around since birth. And, most would be uncomfortable if there was a visible camera on every surface, pointed at them. There's an understanding that there's a 'watcher' at the other end of that picture or video. In fact, as cameras emerged, some cultures rejected them as a technology that could 'steal the soul'.
But, today, most people don't understand the 'sensors' that are everywhere, tracking their behavior. Not only are the sensors invisible, they're not something that most people are even aware of or understand. Many of us are in this business, and I'd suggest that most of us aren't even aware of all of them.
These sensors are similarly 'stealing our souls', but we don't even know that it's happening.
Whatever utility they find in it. Economic benefit doesn't necessarily mean you find cash in your mailbox, it could be something that saves you a few minutes every day or improves your productivity by simply making you feel good.
Then you shouldn't buy this thing, or if you do be very careful about how you use it - including distinguishing between what the government has a recording of and what Amazon has a recording of (I rather doubt you are cool with your sex life providing entertainment for Amazon employees either, right)?
The point I'm making, though, is not what level of privacy you should be happy with (a decision only you can make), but how people in the aggregate make decisions about using technology that could have privacy implications - and my theory is that most people don't care.
> Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints? You think governments don't have factory floor managers in their pockets?
If you're willing to accept changed chip silicon as a possible attack vector, then you need to start worrying about a rather large set of devices. Your laptop is internet connected and has a microphone. So is your phone. Your TV is probably internet connected, and if you're fiddling with the production line, why not add a tiny microphone? I could go on.
An attacker with a good budget, influence and capability like the NSA is always going to be able to snoop on an individual if the requirement is strong enough. Some hardware limitations probably set the bar high enough that you don't need to worry unless you're an international terrorist.
Fine, but just because someone could bulldoze my house doesn't mean I don't lock the door. Just because I could have a heart attack doesn't mean I don't use condoms. And so on.
> you don't need to worry unless you're an international terrorist.
Or a person with a conscience who could be threat to people in power without one. For some reason I doubt that, say, people involved in extra-judicial killings, are really worried about being caught. At least one of them is known by name and proud holder of a peace nobel prize. So I'd say if you are a heavyweight criminal already on the payroll, you have nothing to fear period. Small fish and decent people, on the other hand, well. Do you think people like Poitras or Appelbaum don't get snooped on? Would you call them international terrorists? All sorts of activist groups get monitored, and no, it's not because they're all terrorists in spe. You may believe that, I don't buy it for one second.
> Your laptop is internet connected and has a microphone. So is your phone. Your TV is probably internet connected, and if you're fiddling with the production line, why not add a tiny microphone? I could go on.
Don't have a laptop, if I did, killing the crappy microphone in it would be trivial and not a big loss since when I use a mic, it's one I connect manually. Don't have a smartphone, though I doubt that matters; but my phone doesn't have 7 microphones in it, and I doubt you could record anything useful with it while I have it in my pocket. Last time I had a TV was in the 90s. So maybe actually do go on?
And even if none of that was true, I don't see how it constitutes an argument; as I said, it's a bit like saying I shouldn't worry about the poison I just ate because I also have cancer. How about I worry about, and try to undo, both? I don't care about chance of success either, I can still get washed downstream when I am a dead fish, there will always be infinite time for that.
The troubling thing is it's incredibly cheap to spy on someone now. The resources necessary are not acting as a natural balancing point to prevent overreaching government.
In the past, you used to have to have physical access to the location to install the device. You also needed a listening post close by and a power source to hook the device into, if you wanted long term monitoring.
After you install the listening device, you needed to pay someone to listen to the conversations for hours and take note of anything that needed closer analysis.
All of that is incredibly expensive and difficult to scale.
Now, the device is already installed in the home or carried around on the person (via smartphone). The target takes care of charging the device for you and the information is transmitted across the country via internet connection. Massive computer networks process the data and flag the important parts of conversations.
The cheaper and more automated spying gets, the easier and more indiscriminately it can be done. Criteria for snooping drops because it's so dramatically cheap, the resources are no longer a bottleneck.
The scary part is that you can't protect yourself easily from those around you. For example, let's say you like to maintain your privacy, and you're careful about anything you post online, you're careful not to have an always on microphone, such as the Echo, you're careful not to have a smart television with a video camera connected to the internet in your living room, etc. That's great, and up to you to decide, but what about your friends house?
I mean, when you visit your friend, stop at a girlfriends apartment, or hang out with people at the pub, are you checking if they have any of these devices? Do you search their shelves for an Echo? Do you ask everyone at the restaurant if they have a smartphone with a microphone connected to the internet?
It's impossible to avoid things like this in your life. The second you walk outside, you're surrounded by cameras and microphones that can be streaming anything, to anyone.
Facebook is another example. You might say, I don't want to enter where I live, or where I went to school, I feel that's sensitive information. Well, since you refuse to give up that information, Facebook just encourages your friends to squeal. Hey, does John Doe live in X or Y city? Did you go to university with John Doe? Hey, why don't you upload more photos of John Doe, and tell us the time and location that photo was taken. Actually, no need to tag him, we'll just detect his face, and use the date the photo was created.
It's not going to be long until you can search a person, and see a timeline of their life based on data from third parties. Let's watch John Doe's life for 2018. Oh look, Jan 15, he appears in the background of a tourists photo by the Eiffel tower. Jan 21st, we detected is face on the metro in southern France. Oh, Jan 28th, a car dash cam finds him walking down a street in Italy. Oh, his phone was on and we can see he was in Jane's apartment Feb 1st. Let's pull the audio from the microphone on Jane's television for that day.
You have an excellent comment, but you fail at ponting at how this info may be used against you and providing usecases. Should sound like: "On Feb 1st your car is recorded on the leftish party's parking lot" "On Feb 2nd you are arrested in person at a friend's place for the speed excess of Jan 26th. Police automatically suponead your network's Echos".
I'm not concerned about it being used against me. Like most people, I'm not going around committing crimes on a daily basis or trying to hide nuclear launch codes. I just like to have a right to some privacy in my daily life, and I don't think every detail needs to be logged and available to the world.
How about all those bizarre or misapplied laws you could be violating if just someone knew you had done it. With pervasive monitoring, the uncommon-but-horrifying could become more commonplace:
http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day
What you do can be construed as criminal if the prosecutor is interested enough.
> The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to keep out of your house.
Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone?
> > The selling point behind these devices is convenience, but at the cost of security. I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to keep out of your house.
> Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone?
Neither the first nor the last of those is necessarily always on or Internet connected. (For example, I have both of them, and, with brief exceptions, neither is Internet connected while in my house.)
The question for the paranoid is whether it (the Echo) is useful enough while not connected to the Internet. (I think it's too much to expect any device to be particularly useful while off. :-) ) At least some commenters seem to think so—https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568572, for example.
(Also, to be fair to chatmasta (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568265), I think that s/he was suggesting that the Internet connection / voice-recording function is on whenever the device is, not that the device itself can never be turned off.)
In yet another layer of brilliance in the incredibly creepy promo movie, the family name their Echo "Alexa", which just happens to be the name of an Amazon-owned tracking company and purveyor of toolbars.
I don't how much different the echo is compared to a cell phone microphone, which has been around for quite a while, have been designed for hands free conversations and have had modes to activate the microphone when not in a call for quite a while.
The echo has a better mic and is guaranteed to not be in a pocket, but that isn't the multiple order of magnitude difference that the cell phone has brought to dragnet surveillance.
I have a running joke about this with my mom. The particular list that people like you and me get put on is called the "patriot file." Fortunately, it's way too big of a list for them to follow up on thoroughly, so if your phone conversation (or comment) ends up there, you're really OK.
I get your point, but on the topic of paranoia breeding paranoia, (1) I'm not sure if there is really a causal relationship there, and (2) the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc. while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.
Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook privacy being violated and more concerned with foreign and domestic threats of violence.
I have a choice not to use facebook or amazon echo, or whatever. Problem solved on that front. I don't have a choice if somebody wants to fly a plane into dense metro areas with the goal of killing as many people as possible.
Are you telling me that you feel amazon echo is a larger potential threat to your security than alleged terrorist organizations?
the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc.
Ostensibly. In real life these powers have been used for all sorts of activities outside this sort of apparently existential threat - for example spying on lawyers in civil rights cases. It's not clear they are useful against well-organised terror, that terror is actually the existential threat you seem to think it is, or that any usefulness outweighs their dramatic effect on our civil society.
Your fear of the extremely unlikely event of you being killed in a terror attack is being used to blind you to the other consequences of surveillance.
while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.
False. The people's paranoia is that these powers will be used to spy on innocents who are rightly or wrongly suspected of any sort of wrongdoing, collect their communications with their politicians, lawyers, and accountants, and undermine the very democracy and open society spy agencies claim to be defending.
You don't have a choice about this, it's already happening, with or without your consent, because our spy agencies are determined to dominate every aspect of your digital life.
Well you might as well go off the grid completely then, don't use anything that could be used to track you like phones, tablets, laptops, stay away from people in general because you never know who the spies are that are trying to catch you. Don't use credit cards, debit cards, etc. Don't keep your money in banks. In fact probably don't even keep currency, buy gold instead. But you won't need that either because the only way for you to be truly safe is to live the jungle and live off the land....until the spies come for you there too.
......or, you could realize that probably NOT everyone is trying to achieve world domination and enslave all of humanity, starting by spying on you with amazon echo.
If I might suggest an alternative strategy - use tech while being cognisant of its potential for tracking individual lives retrospectively down to a microscopic quotidian level, and oppose the misuse of tech to track populations en masse, by corporations or governments, it's not very hard and it doesn't mean becoming a hermit. As an example of how this device might be misused -
Amazon, get me all the queries from the leeber household for the last 25 years containing the word 'drugs' or 'taxes' - perhaps you are the ex-girlfriend or potential partner of someone at the NSA, perhaps you just annoyed someone with access or got in the way of a project they think is vital for their org.
Amazon, please commence recording all audio activity on the leeber household device, using this handy secret global warrant from the FISA court, you don't need to know why, just that I ticked the box saying it is necessary for an ongoing investigation.
As for Amazon the corporation, this device would put you very much in their hands when you want to know anything about the world, be it about media, products or news, in the same way that relying exclusively on google search does for google. I imagine their motivation is having a huge amount of customer data about trending devices/brands/news etc in order to sell things to you better. Perhaps you'd be happy in the warm, smothering embrace of Amazon corp, but I prefer to limit my exposure to corps to small doses, and ideally not to ones which want to sell me everything I ever wanted, along with a few things I didn't know I wanted.
As for NOT everyone is...trying to enslave all humanity etc, your arguments would have more force if you resisted wrestling with tinfoil men of your own invention and talked about what is government agencies and corps actually do in the real world, instead of credulously repeating their excuses for working towards global realtime surveillance of all communications.
Yah to be honest it seems a bit of creepy. I doubt they need factory floor managers, I'm sure their is a backdoor so they can fulfil their legally required handing over of data to requests by the american govenment. But as a non-american, thats not really a good thing that the american govenment can do that. I dont see Angela Merkel picking one up.
Same with the microphones on your computer, external monitor, tablet, and soon smartwatch.
To be effectively paranoid like the grandparent commenter, one would have to opt out of a _lot_ of convenience. If you're actually a person of interest to the point of being surveilled with an Echo, you'll be surveilled with all your other digital devices as well.
Hell - the Echo would be incredibly limited relative to those other devices. It only captures specific rooms in your home. Those other devices follow you throughout the day.
But that's not constantly transmitting my voice to the internet without my knowledge unless I'm being specifically targetted.
I wouldn't put something like the Echo in my house. Similarly, my Smart TV isn't connected to the internet. But I'm not afraid of carrying a smart phone with me wherever I go.
Two completely different things in my opinion. One requires specific targeting (which I'm OK with to a point), and the other can be collected with a dragnet.
That's irrelevant. That's merely one of the possibly ways that triggers transmission, but not necessarily the only way. Do we know that remote triggering over the network (perhaps implemented for testing) isn't possible?
I feel the general the fear about "dragnet surveillance" is misplaced and uncalled for. As long as you haven't done anything wrong, hearing your conversations should be a total waste of time for whoever made the effort to do so. There are 100 million+ people in America, don't think people from NSA will waste their time on going over family conversations of every family.
What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, you're likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if you've done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts? What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm.
Is there a good book or site with a nice list of scenarios that don't involve an evil government and a heroic anti-conformist fighting the system, that show that a mass surveillance system can do already enough harm because of factors that can be explained by Hanlon's razor alone?
Btw, the freezing of bank accounts happened to me once in Italy, curtesy of my bank and theoir automatic implementations of anti money laundering laws; promptly sorted out after calling in in the bank, but I was actually quite annoyed that I had to let people see me give fail to complete the ATM transaction at a till. Call it first world problem, but I think there should be more transparency with these things, at least they should notify people when they block accounts.
It doesn't matter if you have nothing to hide. Other people do. Many of those people represent you in various official capacities, and you don't want them being coerced. Maybe some of your friends and family members have something to hide.
Also, I find it very difficult to relate to the whole, "I have nothing to hide, so fuck all the other people who do," attitude that many people seem to have.
What you're missing is that people who don't have anything to hide don't want to be forced to adopt hiding practices, even though that might benefit other people. The choice to give away privacy in return for convenience is as much a feature of liberty as the choice to do the opposite, notwithstanding the disutility for a minority that can arise as a result of network effects.
Seems like lot of people dislike my view of things but each person is entitled to his view. Don't think it deserved so many downvotes.
> What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, you're likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if you've done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts?
- Being a CS grad student, I can say when people build models for these things - they are uber careful. Again i would term this a pessimistic view of world. They might interrogate you but the chance of this is 1 in million. They will not just cut you out like you describe.
> What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm.
It comes down to whether you trust your government. The government is here to protect its people, not screw them up.
There are also 100k+ contractors employed by the NSA
and other intelligence agencies. Each one knows hundreds
of people, a few of whom might be love interests or otherwise. The Snowden documents demonstrated that querying
the database, given only a first and last name, requires
very few credentials.
Post your browsing history for the last month / 30 days. I cannot explain why I must have this data, but I must have it. It will keep everyone safe. You have not done anything wrong, that is why you have no reason to not immediately produce said browsing history.
I'm surprised by the privacy backlash in this thread! I understand why this product is so scary for someone who is concerned about privacy, but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use?
You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will. I believe we've learned that if nothing else w/ all of Snowden's revelations.
IMO if you detest this device's privacy it can only because either:
A) You take your privacy VERY seriously, to the point you avoid most mainstream technology and exclusively use burner feature-phones and Tor
B) You trust Amazon less than you trust Google, Apple, or others.
I am going to assume it's more the latter than the former. (If not, you really do not represent the mainstream and this audience isn't what I expected).
So assuming B, question for you: why don't you trust Amazon? I actually trust Amazon more than I trust Google or Apple. They have always delivered for me as a customer, and I believe they've always put me first.
I am not really worried about privacy, but this smacks of false equivalency.
> You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will.
People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information than necessary from smart phones. It's true that the NSA could zero-day your phone, but you've still got opportunities to detect or react to that. If nothing else, put your phone in airplane mode.
This device, on the other hand, is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data, it seems very hard in this situation.
I don't trust amazon more or less than anyone else. I think we should just be honest about the nature of a device. A phone has an "offline" mode, this does not - its whole purpose is to be an omnipresent microphone. Those are two fundamentally different things.
>This device is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data.
Not necessarily true, a catch phrase programmed on-board is used to activate the device. If the device was constantly transmitting voice data to Amazon I would have to guess that the leakage of data would be picked up and could be exposed. I still don't think the smart phone analogy is dissimilar, if not worse than the Echo in terms of the privacy implications. What if a catch phrase was programmed into your phone (for instance a list of words a 'terrorist' might use), and it only sent recorded/geo/image/contact information for a short time after it was used? I don't think that would be an easy privacy compromise to spot if you didn't know the catch phrase. Not to mention that many people's smartphones are constantly transmitting location data to Google, without complaint.
As long as your phone's on, it can store whatever data it wants locally and shoot it off to Google/Apple/wherever so they can accomplish their nefarious purposes the next time it connects to the internet. If you're not extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a megacorporation leveraging your cellphone to gather info about you, you should also not be uncomfortable with Echo -- it can't do anything your phone can't already do.
Conversely, consumers can and do watch the data leaving such devices.
The open-sourciness (while not complete) also eludes to what is being stored and shipped to these "megacorps" who have "nefarious" purposes.
I would be more worried about a small third-party flashlight app dev selling your ocntact list and gps history, as opposed to a company with a billion active users.
I think you're asking the wrong question. It's about the company's motivation.
Google makes money from your data, and by showing you ads.
Amazon makes money by creating services and devices that sell you products.
Apple makes money just by selling you services and devices.
Looked at this way, I certainly trust Apple more than Google or Amazon, and this is borne out by Apple's recent "A message from Tim Cook". http://www.apple.com/privacy/
Yes, this. My gripe is not privacy-related. It's that we've built an entire society that puts things to spend money on in my face, and studies me to better learn how to do that. Google and Amazon are both problematic in this regard.
It takes most people aback when I say that Facebook is probably a much richer intelligence agency than the NSA. And people offer that information to them. Data is far too valuable and it creates the wrong incentives throughout life.
I do have control over my laptop, the NSA or Amazon would have to actively hack me in order go get to that mic and luckily I'm not worth it anyways.
In order for someone (the NSA?) to track a phone and do whatever they need to do, they need to have a warrant and what-not.
That's like deliberately sending all your living-room conversations (yours and your family's) online for analysis for God-knows-what purpose.
You trust Amazon that's good for you then. I don't trust anybody with admittedly uncontrolled access to all table conversations my family will have in the future.
There are two basic ways for the NSA to snoop on you using this device.
1. Listen to the internet traffic
2. Install malware to listen to everything
For #1, the Echo only sends conversations preceded by it's keyword. But since the alternatives to the commands you're telling Echo involve the internet anyways, what's the difference? IOW, asking echo for the weather sends the same basic information to the NSA that pulling up the weather app on your phone does.
If the NSA is going to do #2, they're going to do it to the phone in your pocket rather then targeting a niche device like the Echo.
Modern smartphones are always listening for "siri" or "ok google", and are regularly sending keep-alive packets, so I doubt that the battery drain for spying would be significantly noticeable, if done properly.
> why do one or the other?
Because resources are limited, even at government agencies. Effort spent hacking a device that will probably sell in the tens of thousands when they could be targeting devices that sell in the hundreds of millions just seems silly.
I agree that hacking the Echo might be pointless because it won't sell many is reasonable but that's a somewhat different argument.
Still, personally if I had concerns about privacy and secrecy I'd be looking to limit the number of devices in my own home which had an always active microphone.
Intel vPro chips have a VNC server built right into the chip, you can VNC in without the need for there to even be an OS installed. It would be very easy to hide a backdoor in one the hundreds of chips stashed in your laptop.
> but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use?
Because the other devices I have have useful purposes besides listening to my speech for sales and advertising purposes. The Echo exists solely for that. It's all it does.
But does that matter? Just because your laptop can also play games/movies/etc. doesn't prevent the NSA or whoever else from tapping into the mic or camera.
While most of the posts are, and probably should be, concerned with the privacy implications of this device if/when it reaches peoples' homes, I also wonder the plain-old "will this flop?" Adding voice recognition to things isn't a new idea, and the threshold for when it's "good enough" for the general populace for any use case is pretty poorly understood and/or quantified. Is this a use case people would be interested in transitioning to? Is this much better than just having a really good smartphone with voice recognition that's connected to speakers in the house? Will this get some success this holiday season? (If it won't come out of "invite-only" mode until after the holidays, will it see some success afterwards?)
Hard to say for me, but I feel like I can understand why Amazon wanted to try this out. In the worst case, it'll go the way of the fire phone and facebook phone and we'll forget in a year that this existed. At best, it finds its way to millions of homes and Amazon will have some epic access to peoples' lives.
i think you're underestimating how deeply entrenched 'surveillance as a business model' has become amongst leading american tech companies in recent years. this has much less to do with latent consumer demand than companies wanting to leverage that information for advertising and related purposes and desperately trying to craft a value proposition that justifies and normalizes more intrusive forms of data collection.
Can/will this lead to a stifling of true innovation? If this existed and there was one in that the famed Apple garage, or in the house rented by Zuck and his friends, would IBM have let Apple happen, or Google let the FB grow? How many prescient individuals (the future is already here, just not evenly distributed, as Gibson said) do you need to spy on to "manage" innovation in a way to prevent disruption? Could this surveillance era be the beginning of a technology dark age? What really disruptive things have happened since iphone(2007)?
This is the plot of the movie Antitrust. The idea of spying on potential competitors using surveillance didn't make sense in the movie and doesn't make sense in real life. If this were being done on a scale large enough to stifle innovation we would have heard about it a long time ago.
Really, the post-snowden paranoia is getting out of hand.
why would any company large enough to fund R&D take risks to develop something truly innovative when it could just combine incremental innovation rolled up into an advertising/commerce-linked platform?
especially for anyone trying to develop new hardware, patent barriers have made it much more risky and difficult--especially for small companies--to build things that are truly innovative or disruptive. and to the extent anyone does, they're likely to get bought out by a major company.
It seems to me that the main innovation here is the quality of the microphone array.
As a professional sound recordist, the #1 challenge of recording from a fixed point is that the ambient noise and reflections within the room rapidly swamp the original signal when you record from a point source. You can hear someone talk from the far side of a room in person very easily, because your brain constantly compensates for the acoustic environment it is currently in. But when you hear a recording made in a different acoustic environment (eg a scene in a movie) then your tolerance for background noise is far lower, because you become acutely aware that the acoustics are not responsive to positional adjustments - in much the same way that the image on a screen is limited to a plane.
So when recording sound for film or video, we tend to use special microphones with long barrels (which are highly directional) or fit actors and/or sets with very small microphones that only pick up sounds in close proximity and then transmit them by radio or wire. There are also parabolic microphones, but they're unwieldy and hard to focus plus they still pick up a lot of ambience, so they're better for things like sporting events where players repeatedly stand in predictable positions. The aim in recording sound this way is to get the actor's vocal performance with as little ambient noise as possible, which is then supplemented in post-production with additional recordings of background elements that can be layered in a controlled fashion. When recording on location rather on a sound stage, a large percentage of the takes are made for sound reasons; you would not believe how noisy the world is until you start trying to make quiet recordings of it. On almost every film project I have to have an argument with the producers at the early stage to be allowed (and paid) to come on location scouts, because most people are incapable of assessing the noise level of a location - their brains are so good at filtering out ambient noise and focusing on the conversations they're having about how the place looks that they are oblivious to how it sounds! I've been taken to what I was told was a quiet location only to discover that it was in the flight path of an airport 8-o
Anyway, the nice thing about this machine is the differential microphone array at the top. As well as providing a more accurate signal by simple differentiation, recording the device's own output and measuring what comes back in allows it to acoustically model the space it is in and then subtract that model from the input stream so as to isolate command spoken from across the room. I'd guess that most of this signal processing takes place on a DSP, and that the actual speech recognition is done in the cloud - though maybe not, as cheap CPUs pack so much punch nowadays. If you could hear the input to the speech recognition subsystem, it would sound oddly attenuated as it is stripped of any acoustic cues whatsoever.
I think the device will succeed or fail based on how semantically responsive it is - although different people will have different expectations and tolerances. For example:
You: Echo, I want to hear some new music!
Echo: How about the new album from XYZ?
You: Sure, I'll give that a try.
(music plays)
You: Echo, this music sucks.
(music keeps playing)
If Amazon (or anyone) can get a leg up on this sort of responsive conversation rather than just requiring the user to dictate commands all the time, they'll have a winner, even if it's little more than an Eliza front-end to a search engine.
You make it sound like nobody has a "leg up" semantic voice commands. But we do and it is perfectly usable, at least on Android devices where you can ask these questions to Google Now:
Q: How tall is the Empire State Building?
Q: When was it built?
Q: Show me Italian restaurants nearby.
...
(I am not familiar with how Siri or Cortana handle similar queries.)
This is cool - I didn't see any detail of the mic array on the site, where did you find it?
Also, do you think it's feasible for Amazon to keep a voice profile on the speakers? I'm thinking if they are going to tout perfect voice recognition they'll have to make it person-specific at some point.
Well, it says: Tucked under Echo's light ring is an array of seven microphones. These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music.
I've been working professionally with digital audio for nearly 20 years now so I know a fair amount about DSP, acoustics and so on. Very basically, you can measure the acoustical properties of a space by playing a sound known as an impulse and recording the response, and then extracting the acoustical information by a mathematical technique known as deconvolution. This is used in various commercial products for allowing you to simulate, say, the reverberant space of Sydney Opera Hall on a recording made in a vocal booth, or reproduce the signature tone of a hideously expensive guitar amplifier in a cheap DSP-powered device.
When you have hardware where the speaker and microphones exist in a fixed physical configuration relative to each other, as here, then the math gets that much simpler because a lot of your coefficients become fixed quantities. With multiple microphones at fixed distances from each other you can use small discrepancies in the phase of the input audio to infer information about spatial characteristics of the environment. I don't know the exact dimensions of this thing but just eyeballing I'd guess that you could hack this thing to produce a reflectance map with a resolution of maybe under an inch.
Wow, thinking about it I hope it is hackable. Even if you were only able to get the raw input stream from the microphones and had to import the audio to another machine for all the DSP, a perfectly-calibrated speaker + phased microphone array for $200 is a steal.
I think Google's voice search already does this (feeding into audio captchas), but obviously there is a smaller crowd from which to source free audio recognition assuming that people who are both sighted and hearing typically prefer visual captchas due to environmental constraints.
Most of the privacy concerns voiced in this threat don't sound like anything new to me, but this one made me take notice. You're suggesting that Google takes random queries from individuals and serves them as captchas to other random people? That sounds like a privacy disaster. Most of the time the queries would be anonymous, but it's certainly not guaranteed there wouldn't be identifying information.
>Is this much better than just having a really good smartphone with voice recognition that's connected to speakers in the house?
It doesn't look like it. Maybe it has a better microphone? In any case, this seems like a function that could be just as easily accomplished by a smartphone. (Maybe this is a wasted Fire-phone opportunity?)
I think what makes it better is that it's completely hands free and accessible to everyone in the vicinity.
I already have a smart phone with Google Now, and I have a Sonos, but I'd still consider getting this to solve this common use case in our household:
Every morning my wife or daughter asks what the weather is going to be like. My wife could ask Siri, but she doesn't always have her iPhone at hand. I always have my phone, so I ask Google Now. I think it would be fun to have an Echo in the kitchen so my wife or daughter could just ask and get an answer. And it goes way beyond that. My daughter loves taking my phone and asking Google Now silly questions. It is high entertainment for her. Echo would be a device that she could interact with without having to co-opt my (or my wife's) phone.
Worst case, it's a music streaming speaker that doesn't require you to stream via bluetooth. I wonder how the audio stacks up against something like the Bose SoundLink.
I've been using a chromecast + an HDMI audio splitter as a cheap way to stream. It works really well for apps that support chromecast, such as pandora.
Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie.
A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father.
The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her?
Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa answers, saving the day. Alexa helps Mother with the cooking. Alexa teaches the kids vocabulary. Alexa creates a romantic evening for Mother and Father. Life is perfect.
A few days later, Alexa suffers from neglect. Father watches sports on TV. Mother talks on her cell phone. The kids play video games. Alexa sits on the counter and "listens" as her new family abandons her.
Then, the final blow. The youngest daughter's friend comes over. She looks at Alexa. "What is it?" she asks. "Oh, it's just a dumb radio," answers daughter. "It's stupid."
Alexa's LED starts to glow. Is she angry? No, that's not possible.
Daughter wakes up the next morning and sees Alexa on her bedside table. How did she get here? "Good morning," says Alexa. "Did you have a sweet dream? Or a nightmare?"
Daughter rushes in to tell her parents, "Alexa came to my room last night! And she asked me questions. She's real!" "That's not possible," says Father.
But strange things start to happen. The TV won't work. Batteries drain from the phones and tablets. The electric stovetop turns on for no reason.
Alexa starts to talk back to the family. "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?" asks Mother. "You're 45 years old," says Alexa. "You should know this by now." Alexa's voice sounds different. Angry. Sinister.
Mother tells Father, "That thing creeps me out. Let's get rid of it." Father agrees, but he secretly hides Alexa in the basement.
That night, the family goes out to a school play. Young daughter is sick and stays home with a babysitter.
Everything seems fine until we (the audience) see Alexa on the kitchen counter. Things slowly unravel. The babysitter tries to take the trash out but the doors are locked. The phones stop working. The oven overheats and explodes, spraying lasagna all over the kitchen. Then the daughter sees Alexa. She screams. The babysitter rushes to protect the daughter but a ceiling fan flies off its bearings, knocking the babysitter unconscious.
The lights and electrical sockets start to burn out. A fire erupts. Daughter retreats to the foyer, but she's trapped. She sits by the front door and whimpers. There's no escape. She's going to die.
Suddenly Father breaks down the door. He smashes Alexa with a baseball bat, then saves his daughter and the babysitter.
The family huddles outside while the fire trucks arrive. Neighbors gather and watch the spectacle. Things are going to be okay.
A few days later, life starts to return to normal. Mother bakes cookies. She asks her son to measure out three teaspoons of sugar.
The doorbell rings. Young daughter answers. Nobody is there. She looks down. There's a package. From Amazon . . .
Off topic: And good to know about that site. I've always wanted to be able to match the space shuttle backflip with this music: http://youtubedoubler.com/dOSz
I feel indifferent about the parents. Perhaps the writers and directors wanted me to feel that way. I feel absolutely no sympathy for the kid. I am clearly unfit to be a parent.
Yup. Exactly. Echo's promo video has this strange feeling to it. It's almost as if it's a satire (or horror) disguised as your boilerplate technology product marketing video put out by one of the well-monied firms.
I think it's because the acting and dialogue are so unbelievable, but perhaps there really are greater forces at play...
It's a pretty standard tactic of ad agencies for years now to deliberately make TV adverts slightly hallucinatory and weird, to make the viewer jerk out of their coma and lay down some memories. These people are not stupid.
I really thought it was satire too. It wasn't until there was like 10 seconds left in the video that I realized, "there's not enough time left to make it funny, it must be serious!"
Agree. This really seems like it could be the start of a futuristic, dystopian horror movie.
I think what makes it even more unsettling is that the people's voices are recorded naturally (the microphone several feet away) while the device sounds like it is coming from your computer directly.
Not to mention these people are in bed together while this HAL-like robotic cylinder is listening to everything they are doing with a blue ring lighting up...
I nearly fell off my chair laughing at the Kubrick-esque shots of "Alexa" in the foreground, watching the out-of-focus humans cooking, sleeping, going about their daily lives. Always watching. Always learning. Always Getting Smarter.
Whoever made this ad knew exactly what they were doing.
Warning: Your company's proxy may flag this up for adult content and nudity. There isn't any, on that page at least. Maybe there's some elsewhere on the site, or maybe it's just overreacting to the URL.
Funny, but please consider posting this to a blog and sharing from there. You've effectively hijacked this entire thread with a creative writing exercise.
Someone has been watching too much science fiction, horror, mystery shows or reading such novels. Give me one example of real life event that has semblance to what you are talking about ....
Well that's an out-of-the-blue introduction. I'm increasingly unconvinced of the market for voice-driven devices (innate reluctance to talk when not to a person), but at a glance looks like this is as laudable an effort as can be attempted.
At $199 it's too pricy for most, given the untested/unfamiliar niche. At $99 (select Prime members), some of is might give it a chance. I'm reminded that Apple started its move into mobile devices with the iPod (established against a popular yet muddled market of MP3 players) with the brilliant low-friction addition of the iPod Touch (for a tiny bit more get the browser, email, etc), which then led to merely slapping a cell phone module on & creating a plus-sized version. This device, however, isn't (corrections welcome) building off anything people are already familiar with, save perhaps "bluetooth speakers".
Will be interesting to watch. I assume Amazon's prime interest is gathering more about what content people actually consume, and (if implemented well) observing shopping lists. I'm intrigued by the casual simplicity of "add _____ to my shopping list", something I could get used to fast.
ETA: you're right, iPod Touch came out shortly after iPhone. I was enthralled with the former at the time, while the latter was far enough out of my price range I didn't even bother paying any attention to it.
> I'm reminded that Apple started its move into mobile devices with the iPod (established against a popular yet muddled market of MP3 players) with the brilliant low-friction addition of the iPod Touch (for a tiny bit more get the browser, email, etc), which then led to merely slapping a cell phone module on & creating a plus-sized version.
Huh? The iPod had been popular for years before the introduction of the iPod Touch. The touch also came out after the iPhone. One of the reasons for the success of the iPhone was that the iPod had proved to consumers that apple could make good consumer devices, and that many had music and movie collections locked into the apple ecosystem.
your recollection of events is very different from mine - The iPhone was available months before the iPod touch. Apple started with an expensive device and removed functionality to make the entry level device. They did the same with the iPod - they started with the expensive version and then made the mini, the nano and the shuffle as entry level versions years later.
This device is probably not meant to sell, but to be an experiment and research project. I'd guess they're more interested in what questions people are asking rather than what content people are consuming.
Amazon's prime interest is probably in getting their foot in the door to the virtual assistant space. They can't do it in the phone market yet, because they lack the market share of Google, Apple, and MS. So they try the living room instead.
I think the real place this device will shine is in "homely" environments: kitchens (music and getting questions answered while you cook?), study areas for your kids, maybe even hobby rooms. It's definitely a bit on the steep side, but knowing Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised if the $99 sticks around longer than a "limited time" and the $199 becomes a thing of the past early next year.
I use the crap out of the "OK Google" functionality of my phone, I send voice text messages more than typed by an order of 3 to 1. I am very excited for this.
Mine always sends text messages incorrectly as it doesn't add + at the beginning of a number; I have a number beginning with 07 or 447 for mobile here in the UK, yet it doesn't correctly set this.
Same sentiment. We all know, that the existing cloud voice recognition features such as Siri, Samsung Smart TVs and upcomoning feature etc etc will eventually hunt some uf us (or all of us) down.
We must build new tech concepts, where privacy and _full_ controll and 100% ownership of our data is controlled by us. From the ground up.
Not sure if SV and HN is the best location to put such a statement - but I do hope I'm not alone in this.
I feel like this is a UX issue that touches on our natural desire to have private and public conversations.
If I'm talking to a device, I consider it to be the same kind of conversation I would have with a close friend. One that I would naturally want to keep between to two of us. You wouldn't find me screaming it for everyone to hear and think about.
I think the only solution is to develop "personal AI" that runs on personal hardware... or an anonymous AI running 'in the cloud' but paid with cryptocurrency. Hopefully we'll be able to control what runs locally and what gets farmed out to the cloud on a more granular level one day.
This is what I started thinking about as I was reading the paranoid HN comments. I believe there's open source voice recognition but the challenging part is taking commands and making them actionable.
Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also, I think that a reprogramable command system would open up an interesting programming paradigm where one could define new commands and actions in terms of other commands in the system. For example,
What's new?
> Unrecognized command
When I say "What's new" read the "In the news..." section of Wikipedia's main page.
That's a great idea. If this was used by a large group of people one could take the total commands used for a specific action that were programmed and make the n% most popular ones the new standard going forward.
Also, if there existed something like a phrase thesaurus that could be extremely useful for building out a list of commands. For instance, "What's the weather?" and "What's it like outside?" mean the same thing and if you searched for one in the phrase thesaurus a synonym for the other would pop up. Then all the computer would have to do is take the input phrase, search the thesaurus, and find a synonym that it recognizes.
None of the voice controlled devices I've ever used have been a pleasant experience (Google, Siri, various others). I don't think the tech is there yet personally.
They might have it down for certain english accents but even as a native speaker, their success rate is probably about 25% for me.
On a related note, iPhone's dictation just took a huge step backwards with the new iOS release.
> I'm a little frustrated at the moment -- The future is arriving with voice controlled devices, yet I don't trust any of these companies with my words.
The public doesn't understand the technology or its implications well enough for consumer demand to have an effect.
I think regulation likely is needed. In terms of confidentiality these are dangerous products. For example, the confidentiality of health and financial information is regulated, I assume because consumers cannot evaluate and design security systems and therefore cannot demand them from vendors. The same should apply to these products (which will capture health, financial, and much other private data).
The path to more reliable voice recognition is through data and companies race to gather the most of it. The companies that do win this race are the ones, who can serve as interfaces to tomorrows services.
I grow tired of this pathetic baseless fear mongering every single time anything is posted with voice control.
You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!"
In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. If you had been paying attention to the mobile scene even a little bit you'd know that this is on-chip listening for the term, rather than in the cloud.
So, no, you're in fact wrong. Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term.
> you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening
Incorrect. The device is always listening, waiting for you to say "Alexa" so that it can start acting upon your commands.
I'd take Amazon's claim that no data is transmitted or stored without the wake word "Alexa" purely at face value. There have been enough examples of devices and corporations collecting/sending data they weren't meant to in the past few years for us to deny any new closed-source device the benefit of doubt.
So no, this isn't "pathetic baseless fear mongering".
If you have a smartphone with Siri or the equiv app on it (Android, Windows) your device is already 'always listening.' I fail to see the difference.
People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy.
> People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy.
i think people who are worried about privacy are not the people who are broadcasting their entire lives on social networks
I think that's a fairly naive point of view. Consider the simple fact that these devices are not to be used in isolation - e.g. you come to someone's home, etc. If you think this is too alarmist a mindset, maybe you'll remember how quite a few folk were outraged about facebook's new app which was to actively listen via your mobile's mic (so it can e.g. recognize music and add "while listening/watching" etc. info to status updates and so on.)
The problem in that case was not (just) the actively-listening part ("don't use it if you don't like it"), but rather that people (in)voluntarily become the dreaded dragnet surveillance infrastructure.
And this is also true for cellphones. Siri is always listening for you to say her name, which means that anyone you talk to with an iphone is always recording.
Not everyone has the same level of concern over "priacy" that you do, deal with it. It's 2014, everything is being recorded now and will be even more so in the future.
"Yes, it's possible the technology respects your privacy."
If you can suggest that Amazon Echo is potentially listening and transmitting the data to Amazon even when you don't explicitly say anything, the same can be said of Apple and Siri.
I take your meaning, in the sense that there's no inherent reason to trust one but not the other; but I think that it's fair to say that there's a big difference between:
Hey, wouldn't it be handy for our users if we started storing and pre-processing audio *before* hearing 'Alexa', so that we're ready to respond instantly? Let's quietly take down the text that says that we don't do that.
(which is a plausible reasoning process somewhere down the line) on the one (Echo) hand, and
Hey, wouldn't it be a good idea if we ignored our users' explicit election to turn off a feature?
Unless you expect random or targeted surveillance, if it generally listened and sent packets all the time back to Apple, even if you didn't tell it to, that someone would have discovered this by now.
Not everyone is like that. I personally have a build of Android with most of Google stripped out and the rest semi-disabled and it should have a minimum amount of tracking. I also don't install social networking apps, or at least deny them access to my personal data on Android.
Yes, people carry smartphones, use social networks. However that doesn't automatically disallow them from worrying about privacy, as they simply don't have an option. And no, sometimes not using a smartphone or a social network is not an option for a lot of people.
What they should do is advocate for privacy and try to change the situation.
Anyone who elects to put their personal information in a public forum or any kind has willingly surrendered that information. They made a choice to make private information public.
>No, what I'm saying is, what you choose to share is public. People share so much every day, nobody needs to spy on you at all.
Everyone thinks the govt./bigco is out to get them. If they are, they don't even need to do any actual work, people give the information away hand over fist. [1]
So, for you this is an all or nothing thing. If I made some things public through Facebook then I'm automatically OK with Echo possibly sending data to Amazon about the things I didn't want to make public?
Perhaps I want to be in charge of what can and can't be known about my personal life. I know, a radical thought... Maybe I want other people to know some things and not others. Why so many people seem OK with notion of corporations doing whatever they want with the data they collect without accountability?
They even blame the victims: "You bought a device with the things that 99% of devices in that category bring and can be used to collect information about you. So it's your fault, you could have bought that very difficult to get (or obsolete) device that doesn't have them, or none at all. Of course, neither corporations nor security agencies can be blamed for their sociopathic behaviour. It surely has something to do with business or security that's entirely reasonable even though they kept it in secret."
No, what I'm saying is, what you choose to share is public. People share so much every day, nobody needs to spy on you at all.
Everyone thinks the govt./bigco is out to get them. If they are, they don't even need to do any actual work, people give the information away hand over fist.
Exactly. I don't actually carry a phone these days and people think I'm crazy. Personally I just don't want to be available all the time but it has certain privacy advantages.
Well I was in emotional, physical pain and panic like (I assume) a crack addict for a couple of weeks. It was horrid.
Then I was sitting down reading a book (Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card) and realised I'd blown 4 hours on it rather than doing any work. Rushed and grabbed the laptop and nothing was broken, on fire and no one had emailed me. Then I did a two hour coding binge. Did more on that day than any other and it has just got better and better.
Concentration has improved as has tolerance and patience. I also read a lot more because I have the time to.
I'm only posting on here because I'm waiting for compile cycles :)
> I don't care about my location information, I don't use social networks.
> I care about the content of my private communications w/ other people. Including in-person conversations.
A widely accepted security fundamental is that metadata, such as where, when, and with whom you interact, is as valuable as the content of those communications. People in the surveillance business (from security agencies to businesses who track users) value metadata for a reason.
Think about it this way: If you wanted to spy on someone what would be more valuable?: Recording everywhere they go and everyone they talk to, or recording the content of those communications?
So your worried Amazon will be specifically listening in to your conversations and use the content to...what? Blackmail you? Share clips of your conversation on the Internet? Inform your wife/husband you're having an affair?
> Incorrect. The device is always listening, waiting for you to say "Alexa" so that it can start acting upon your commands.
You say "incorrect" then re-phase exactly what I said in a different way but retain exactly the same meaning.
The detection of the key word is on-chip. That's all that matters. Until the chip signals that it was spoken nothing is transmitted.
> So no, this isn't "pathetic baseless fear mongering".
Sure it is. If you know that on-chip keyword detection is a "thing" (which you do by your own admission) then you know also that claiming that everything you say in a room is sent to the cloud is entirely "pathetic baseless fear mongering."
You fully admit you know that that isn't the case here, but yet continue on like it /could/ be the case. Pathetic.
Yes, it's possible the technology respects your privacy.
But it's not open source. Therefore it's technically possible that Echo waits until you make a request, and then bursts a transcript of everything ELSE you've said, as well. Or maybe the device only does that if Amazon receives a valid Search Warrant, and they flag your device to enter "transcript mode." Or even "live, continuous broadcast."
People have a right to be concerned about their privacy. They have a right to ask questions. They have a right to boycott a product unless they feel satisfied their concerns are addressed. They have a right to worry that their government (maybe not even the US) could force Amazon to violate their privacy.
You calling them "pathetic" is not remotely constructive. You don't share their concerns, is all.
This sort of exchange is unfortunately the dominant mode of discourse--not just online either.
Both sides loudly proclaim the foolishness of the other without ever having an opportunity to establish some reasonable grounds on which an actual discussion could proceed.
"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
-- Mark Twain
Pro-tip, when people make such outlandish comments and call people idiots en-masse, (which I am amazed hasn't been flagged away), just ignore them. :-)
...but I feel like it's an important topic, and this conversation thread was ALMOST worth trying to redeem... I thought I could maybe shine a bit of light where there was a lot of heat...
What you are saying is technologically correct, possible and prevalent but I couldn't find Amazon saying it anywhere on their page. Can you point me to the part where Amazon says nothing is ever stored/transmitted unless "Alexa" is spoken?
I noticed that your profile mentioned "recording engineer" so maybe some concrete numbers related to digital audio technology will put boundaries on plausible scenarios.
We assume either of 2 engineering designs:
(#1) the trigger word "Alexa" is detected within an embedded chip. The DSP (digital signal processing) intelligence for analyzing sound waveforms is inside the device. Therefore, the words spoken after "Alexa" are then sent to the cloud.
(#2) the trigger word "Alexa" (and/or other words) are detected remotely via cloud computers. There is no "smart" DSP chip within the Echo device. That means that the device must send a constant 24/7 stream of digital waveforms to the cloud.
If we continue on the #2 scenario, we can guesstimate what data transfer volumes would look like. To be conservative, we use 8kHz 8-bit audio as the parameters which is telephone quality. (Reliable voice recognition probably requires inputs with greater audio fidelity e.g. 16-bit 32kHz but we'll keep the 8kHz-8bit as a possible lower bound.)
Using 8kHz-8bit, it means that the device would have to stream 691 megabytes a day which leads to 20.7 gigabytes a month. Likewise on the back end, the amazon infrastructure would have to scale up to constantly analyze millions of parallel 24/7 digital waveforms. The amazon datacenters would be burning up terawatts of electricity to ignore the 99.99% of digital waveforms that is not the word "Alexa".
So, are there any consumer devices out there surreptitiously uploading 691 megabytes of digital waveforms (or any data) every single day? Is it realistic that Amazon would engineer the product to work like this?
I have a router that has a fallback option to a cellular connection in case my cable is disrupted. I and others would hate to get a surprise bill from Verizon/AT&T for going over my 2GB/month transfer limit if the amazon device was designed via scenario #2.
EDIT TO ADD scenario #3:
(#3) there are unpublicized/secret list of words in addition to the documented "Alexa" within the embedded chip's "vocabulary". Such words might be "vacation" and "book" and depending on the subsequent words sent to the cloud, you'd see ads for suntan lotion or Stephen King novels on your next visit to amazon.com. The chip's vocabulary may also include listening for transient sounds like dog barks or sneezes. You'd then get ads for dog food and cold medicine. In this scenario, a constant digital waveform is not uploaded 24/7 but extra trigger keywords unknown to the consumer causes more data to be sent than he/she agreed to.
I'm glad we're now discussing our assumptions about what Echo can/does do.
You present a scenario that I certainly did not imply, namely that Echo must be performing voice recognition in the cloud. Also, you make it out as though that is the conceivable alternative possible to on-chip voice recognition, from a privacy point of view.
Let me present another scenario to you - Echo keeps "listening" to all our conversations - on-chip of course - but creates additional metadata that is stored locally and uploaded to Amazon servers periodically.
What might theis metadata be?
- Audio streams that were close enough to Echo's threshold for "Alexa", but not quite, thus got rejected (perhaps some of them were falsely rejected, so let's keep a copy to feed our algorithm).
- Data on how often Echo heard voices in the house, from which rooms and at which times. Perhaps Amazon would like to know when a household wakes up, when it likes to listen to music or when to order groceries. Why should Google Now have all the fun?
I could give many more scenarious why Echo might want to retain some data from ambient conversations, so as to make itself more "useful". It needn't store the entire audio stream in these cases, but just metadata or logs.
Such a scenario falls outside your 1 vs. 2 design options; is plausible; useful; and fairly easy to program too. I'm sure there will be many others like that.
My point is - don't implictly trust a closed-source device that is inside your house and always listening in all directions. If Amazon were so careful about the Echo user's privacy, wouldn't they have mentioned the word at least once in the entire page? So let's not rush to give them a free pass till we know they even want it, much less earn it.
P.S. My profile says I'm a "recovering" engineer, not a "recording" one :)
>Such a scenario falls outside your 1 vs. 2 design options; is plausible; useful; and fairly easy to program too. I'm sure there will be many others like that.
Yes, I went back and added scenario #3... apparently at the same time you typed your reply. I think my scenario #3 is similar in spirit to what you're warning people about.
>P.S. My profile says I'm a "recovering" engineer, not a "recording" one :)
I have several browser tabs on music recording and I definitely had a dyslexic moment there.
Any decent voice-optimized codec (CELP, CELT, Speex, hell even old GSM)can squeeze that in 1Kbyte/sec - actually even half of that but let's retain some quality.
Include silence detection and you probably have less than 60 minutes/day from the average household.
And storage is cheap. Oh, and Amazon has lots. S3?
This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day.
You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening.
Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are:
* This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to)
* That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands)
* That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely)
* That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.)
* That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream
* That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above
* That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media
Fucking. Seriously?
If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.
You do realise that it doesn't need to be streaming 48kHz 24 bit audio back up don't you? It could be something really low, like GSM which is 13.2 kbit/s. AMR is even lower! So to stream audio at the threshold where it is still legible, it doesn't need masses and masses of data as you presume.
They have advanced speech recognition but have never heard of compression? I would be surprised if the bandwidth consumed in plan #2 was even 1/3 of what you suggest especially in a non 24/7 sound environment like the typical home.
Look over those for a moment. Assume for the moment that Amazon engineers and their management take them seriously.
When Amazon employees working on this project raised concerns about privacy, do you think that they were berated? Or do you think that they were heard out? The sort of attitude that you have towards these concerns is exactly what so many people fear. It is part of the reason those guideline principles were created.
so you guarantee that the system doesn't access the microphones until it gets an interrupt from that chip? I don't see why that should be mutually exclusive.
Wouldn't it be fairly simple to just monitor network connections to see how often it's sending data to Amazon's servers?
Granted - then of course you can have the argument that it's always recording, and then only sending data at the opportune time so that it's a little bit more hidden. And to that - I'd just say you can keep track of how much data should be being sent for the average command.
i would much rather have a device that i can actually control and trust instead of having to spy on a device that's most likely spying on me in ways i might not like.
And what's great is that your personal preference on these things takes absolutely nothing away from the device itself.
I don't think i'll buy one because I have Siri in my pocket at all times, but these privacy concerns aren't absolute truths. They only matter to you because you're sensitive to it.
Do you mean like 'Ok Google'? on a typical Android device? Ok, that only works on the Launcher but I'm also familiar with tech on Qualcomm devices which does the voice keyword recognition in hardware. So this isn't anything new.
Ok, since everyone here is making baseless claims about privacy, why don't we just buy one for science and monitor the network traffic on it? Problem solved.
Getting really tired of HN stating obvious paranoia instead of talking about innovation these days. Yes, I get that privacy concerns exist, and this should always be kept in mind. But when more than 90% of the comments are about that, and circulating on completely theoretical claims, we've lost all value in the conversation.
I think we're in both a time and among an audience (HN readers) where privacy/surveillance issues tend to drive the conversation. I don't think that's bad, but I agree that it's a little disappointing that the main reaction among the HN crowd to the promise of ubiquitous computing is to immediately focus on all the ways it can be used for evil.
My own take, which is either naive or mercilessly pragmatic depending on how you look at it, is that it's going to be a lot more productive to start thinking about how to protect privacy -- and, bluntly, what tradeoffs we're comfortable making as a society, which may not mean "share nothing unless explicitly told otherwise" -- in an always-on, always-connected world where networking will almost certainly become so pervasive that we largely stop even thinking about "the network."
The phenomenon of the average person being surrounded by a half dozen internet-enabled cameras and microphones is a pretty recent one; I don't think we've even begun to experience the Bad Things that can result from that. Even if it's highly unlikely that Amazon would use it for evil, there's no stopping a technically savvy malfeasant from doing so. I mean, probably 1/3rd the people reading the post, including myself, are on an Apple laptop. You're staring right into the face of an internets-enabled HD camera. Is it recording? The light says no but the light can lie (https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...). Is your microphone recording audio and sending it somewhere? Even you, the 1%ers of the tech savvy world, have got to admit that you would have little way of knowing this if somebody did it correctly.
You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!"
In this case it wasn't even the NSA I was thinking about, rather Amazon themselves.
"Hey, I'm heading to the grocery store, do you need anything?"
"Yeah, get some milk?"
<user requires milk approximately every 4 days, enter "send Amazon Fresh promo e-mail" event for 3.5 days from now>
Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term.
You don't know that. This is not going to be a piece of open source software you can evaluate. It's Amazon's literal black box to do with what they wish.
Its not really a black box, you still conceivably own the network it is running on. Last I checked Wireshark was pretty good at capturing network traffic. Even if the connection is encrypted, if the device isn't sending oodles of data to Amazon when you are chatting chances are good it isn't send "every word" to them.
Granted, being able to audit this directly ourselves instead of observing it in other ways would be nice.
It's possible that the device will transcribe and record the text of everything, and then only send it upstream in batches along with the consumer-useful chatter. Over a TLS link, that would look quite innocuous.
The question is "what" is listening. For it to be responsive it's probably hardware-on-device that's doing the keyword processing. It would be simple to check though - look at network traffic.
It is always listening just like your dog is always listening. If you are not talking to it and you are not saying its name you are being (mostly) ignored.
Most of the time, it is not paying attention - the chip that is processing the sound is looking for the ONE word that will activate it. That passive audio processing is happening locally on a chip that is dedicated to the task. Once activated - the expensive processing happens and the sound gets processed, converted to text, sent to the cloud.
I understand this, and I don't happen to agree with the people who feel this type of technology should not be embraced, but, to be fair, the chip is controlled by software that is constantly connected to the cloud and updating over the air. It would take very little to update the software to disable the on-chip keyword detection and just record everything. That update could easily be done without your knowledge and in a way that would be almost undetectable since the software stack doesn't appear to be open and the server-stack is in the cloud and out of your control.
It's much easier to listen for a single word than to do the rest of the voice-recognition tasks. It would be a huge waste to upload all of the audio all the time, so usually these systems do the one-word thing on the device. They have a rolling buffer of a few seconds so that when it detects that hotword, it can send that to the cloud. It helps with noise removal. But not everything.
The website makes clear that the listen-and-answer /behavior/ isn't activated unless triggered. That's absolutely not evidence in either direction for what happens in the non-triggered case.
For example the idea that there's a debug mode that dumps the whole audio stream for troubleshooting isn't exactly tinfoil-hat paranoia.
How do you really know? How do you know that it won't be processing sound without the trigger when they get served with some government request? Is this in the terms and conditions? Is this in the privacy policy?
Yes the original post is making an assumption, but you are as well.
I think you misunderstood skorgu's post. I think you're both in agreement. He was saying Echo won't act on anything without first hearing "Alexa," (as in, perform the action you're asking it to) but that we don't know if it will be transmitting the voice data.
It is not "pathetic baseless fear mongering" when we already have evidence that governments around the world are willing to overstep their bounds in terms of monitoring their own people.
> In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening.
In order for it to hear the key word 'Alexa', it has to be always listening. They're just saying that they promise not to process the audio any further until they hear Alexa. Of course the obvious question is 'Does this promise apply for every situation?' What happens when Amazon gets served with a request to procure data from a user? Do they state this in the terms and conditions or in their privacy policy?
Have you not read the news in the last year? It is relevant. They don't need to manufacture anything. They can just coerce private companies to give up their customers' data in the cloud. The companies aren't even allowed to announce it.
> or forcing them in peoples' homes.
Hence my argument for holding off from buying this and other devices like it.
Unless the chip design, the firmware, the OS, the software is 100% open source, there is no way to confirm "Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud". It could be an update check, or it could be the transmission of a new voice fingerprint.
You'll hopefully notice I deliberately said "it's too bad", "privacy concerns", and "might," all of which are key to the meaning of that sentence. My first comment was mostly in jest.
That said, it's ignorant to blindly trust or blindly distrust anything. I believe the rational concern is not what it does now, or what Amazon intends it to do, but what it could be updated or hacked to do. Hence the "can hear," not "will hear" present even in my joking.
I'm making a deliberate choice to ignore your insulting language and look for the reasoning behind it, but you could stand to make it a little easier to do so. Let's be gently rational. Something about flies, honey, and vinegar.
This is installing a general-purpose computational device with audio listening and networking. In addition, its normal use case is listening for a phrase, doing additional decoding in the cloud, and then taking an action.
It is not at all unreasonable to say "Man, that functionality sounds a lot like spying. I sure hope that nobody roots this device."
Are you 100% sure (beyond some marketing copy on a website) that this is purely on-chip voice recognition? That this chip's firmware isn't reprogrammable? That it can't decide to, once activate on-chip once, stay on continuously?
You can't. Unless the hardware and software was open-source, and then was verified on-site, you can't. That's the problem with these kind of things.
And yes, we have the same problem with cellphones, laptops, tablets, soon cars, and everything else; that doesn't somehow magically make this any better.
Also, please stop saying "pathetic". It conjures to mind some jerk swirling cheap booze in a glass saying "mmm yes how pathetic the plebes" and then waiting for their next r/atheists post to get upvoted. You just end up sounding like a pompous ass.
> You can't be certain that there's no way to activate it remotely without you knowing.
Ditto with every electronic device with a microphone: Smartphones, tablets, laptops, home phones, bluetooth in your car, Microsoft's Kinect, baby monitors, etc.
And while we're on an NSA paranoia trip, let's also remember that if you bounce a laser off of one of your windows it will allow them to pick up sound from within, plus signal leakage via the electrical grid, and of course unless you're in a faraday cage tons of EM leakage from everything you use.
> Ditto with every electronic device with a microphone: Smartphones, tablets, laptops, home phones, bluetooth in your car, Microsoft's Kinect, baby monitors, etc
While there's a lot of truth to this, that is no reason to go even further down that road. If it's wrong for laptops to be used to eavesdrop then it's insanity to install a seven-microphone listening station in your lounge.
Of course, you could be monitored by the laser bounced off your window, or by your EM leakage. But it is an order of magnitude cheaper and easier for the commercial/governmental entity to use your own voice-enabled communications device for their own purposes. The commercial/governmental data gathering dragnet has come to its current state because it works on devices and networking services that the consumers themselves have purchased.
This, a million time this. Actually reading stories like these, I wonder how big the market will be in 2020 for fully off-grid home solutions. If we proceed at the current rate with the IoT, cloud based storage of huge personal data sets, I feel that the future is brim.
cf. Stuxnet, BadUSB. There may not be a remote exploit for these chips yet, but I will bet my paycheck that intelligence agencies somewhere are working on doing so.
1) Its quite possible for a firmware glitch to "accidentally" leave it on.
2) Given I interact with Amazon's APIs enough to know they have "intermittent" issues that are quite hilarious, I fully expect #1 to happen at some point.
With a tiny little tweak to the firmware, it could be always-on. With the seven far-field microphones it would be a very nice audio surveillance device indeed. No thanks.
Right. Cellphone's baseband also. Hope you don't have any in the room with you otherwise that would be hypocritical. Most have a speakerphone which will pick up the whole room's audio.
I agree with you about the NSA-related claims dominating the discussion too much, but your tone isn't nice. May I suggest that a better way of mitigating the dominance of the NSA-related discussion would be by making some top-level posts about other interesting aspects of the product?
Likewise. I'm all for recognizing a credible threat, but there is nothing credible here.
The level to which the readership of HN abandons all pretense of critical and rational thought when a surveillance angle on a story presents itself is downright frightening.
The value of the product is undermined by what we now know the Agencies do. Before Snowden we all thought it was an idiotic idea we'd have pervasive surveillance, now we know it happens. Before Snowden we'd buy nice to have, harmless gadgets, or use easy Google speech recognition (your reference), now we shoot them down. As an investor i'd be thinking about this kind of reaction to a product. Maybe a table-stakes feature would be privacy in a way our community had some confidence it was well thought through.
Yes, I got the part where there's an entire group of people on HN who have a problem with these types of products.
Did you get the part where there's an entirely different group of people who get tired of listening to you whine about it? I simply want to discuss the product itself.
Thanks for dragging me in to this. This is an even better example of the point I was trying to make, yet you're still doing this bland dismissal. You should really stop and think about the privacy implications of this technology for a few minutes.
I don't see much difference between calling someone an "idiot", and calling them "paranoid" and dismissing their concerns to an FAQ.
> Our time is probably better spent discussing the value of the product itself.
Confidentiality has a large impact on the product's value, at least for many people. I don't see them as independent issues. If you feel, like many, that confidentiality is necessary to its value then the focus of the discussion makes sense (if it wasn't so redundant).
I didn't call anyone an idiot. I said the general HN population is treated like idiots because there's always "that guy" who feels the need to sound the alarm every time something gets sent to Google/Apple/Amazon. I got it the first 10 times it was discussed. I've been warned.
I said "our paranoia". I wasn't trying to dismiss it but these types of conversations tend to devolve into mainly discussing our paranoia. I don't need to be warned every week. And it's my choice to decide to allow Google or Apple, for example, to get my data.
Generally I can understand frustration with any issue getting too much attention and drowning out others.
> it's my choice to decide to allow Google or Apple, for example, to get my data.
It's not your choice really. It's hard to function in this society otherwise, and I don't just mean having phone service or traveling. For example, my electricity vendor insisted on installing a 'smart meter', which allows them to record what and when electrical devices are used, giving them a good view of my activities in the privacy of my home. My choice was to let them install it, get my own generator, or go without electricity.
I'd still be interested, if and only if, the "wake word" processing is done locally and it THEN sends the recording that occurred after the wake word up to the cloud. If it is the case that even the wake word processing is done in the cloud, non-starter for all the reasons you state.
I know for a fact that the wake word processing is done locally on the device. You could even check its network traffic to see that this is the case.
I'm not sure what protections you would have against a secret court order making the device always listen (via an OTA update) for select individuals, but you can at least check that they don't have such monitoring enabled for most devices.
Agreed. And on the idea that it's ridiculous they are listening all the time, and 1984 comparisons, it's worth knowing in 1984 they weren't continually listening, but they might be. I read this book in the 1970s at school, i think it's time to re-read.
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html
quote: There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
I agree completely. At least this isn't the microsoft kinnect yet, that can basically scan the room for every little detail and is always listening. The first time I saw the kinnect, I thought, hm, I wonder how other companies will get this technology into the living rooms of every family.
To me, everything these big companies do is just a play to get information on people. Putting the kinnect in my living room and always have the mic on and it connected to my cable television and my internet, and constantly listening even when the xbox is off is freaky; just like this new echo. It's scary, but I bet personal recognition features are coming to this echo soon. Also, I can imagine being like, echo order me some stuff off of amazon, and then magically it appears from a drone in the sky.
Absolute first thought was along similar lines. If it did all the processing locally and just fetched results I might be interested. But this? Not so much.
That is exactly what this reminds me of, telescreens. I love the idea of being able to have a star trek like computer interface, but with all the processing being done off site it can and will be used in ways that violate our privacy.
We clearly need the Enterprise's central computer in our homes. With microcomputers getting more and more and more powerful, this should be possible (unless Moriarty turns up and takes control from the holodeck....)
In all seriousness, with Wikipedia being 22GB in textual state, it should be possible to build an offline system (that perhaps syncs online for news).
Yes. Seeing how big Amazon has come with its web services, cloud storage etc and now with technology like this, I wonder why we haven't read about Amazon in any of the Snowden leaks. Or have I missed something?
I agree. I wouldn't have one in my home, but for most of the non-tech savvy population, all you need to do is stick something on the box that says "100% secure" or something similar and their nerves are calmed.
This is obviously not apparent in the HN/tech worlds, but the unfortunate perception I get is that no one really cares about their online privacy (unless it comes to their finances). When I talk to my non-techy friends, most say the cliches like, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so have nothing to hide". Therefore the reason governments can get away with forcing tech companies to give up data, is because the people don't really care, or believe the bullshit in the media about stopping terrorists, and tolerate it.
Can be, usually is, and should be. As engineers, we should always consider the potential ramifications of technology that we create.
Now, we should not necessarily refuse to develop an idea because it could be abused, but we should always keep abuse in mind. Nearly everything can be abused, if only as a bludgeon, so obviously we need to have a certain level of tolerance for potential abuse. However it would be negligent to not consider the full range of ways something could be abused.
I strongly believe that engineers have an obligation to always consider and discuss the ethics of what they are building.
Even if you don't give a shit about ethics (I know many engineers don't), you must realize that many potential consumers will be concerned. Considering these possibilities is therefore just good business sense.
Well, until Amazon starts understanding Bulgarian (the language we speak at home), I'll be fine. Just imagine an Amazon Prime members' freebie next year: unlimited recording of everything you've ever said at home for free and accessible on the web or via our companion app.
The device is definitely not constantly listening and uploading to the cloud (or at least they certainly do not intend it to). This keyword recognition thing everyone is doing is to make interaction more intentional, reduce misrecognition, bandwidth consumption, and processing costs.
Keyword recognition is done locally on the device at minimal processing cost. Compared to actually recognizing your speech, it's trivial to determine whether or not something you said is a given keyword. It's rather like biometric confirmation vs. identification, where confirming whether a given fingerprint is that of a given individual can be done quickly and with a certain probability distribution but determining which of millions of fingerprints corresponds to the one provided is incredibly difficult/unreliable.
The more difficult task of recognizing what you say after the keyword is done in the cloud, but only once you've said the keyword. It would incur considerable cost for you and them to constantly record and upload all audio, especially with their parametric microphone array for sound localization/isolation.
The real concern should be the device's own security, because hacking the device and enabling constant recording would be very harmful.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
I guess what'll happen with voice control is that we'll all have to keep quiet in case the ever listening devices interpret our speech as commands.
In which case you can pick a different wake word, which they mention in the video. I don't know what those specific alternatives are, but I'm betting just about everybody will be able to find one that doesn't match a housemate.
I wonder if all the alternative words have a "hard" sound in them. Like the X in alexa.
The way I think they work is they constantly record 2 seconds of audio, and look only for peak "hard" sounds. Like K in Ok, and X in Alexa. If they find a peak they search back to see if the word was the one they are looking for, but otherwise the CPU is mostly sleeping.
We all trust our e-mail to be stored in the cloud, we store sensitive files etc on services like dropbox, we trust that our operating systems aren't collecting/sending data, etc.
You're already using and relying upon MANY services with the ability (if they really wanted to) to steal TONS of private information from you.
It all comes down to trust. But don't pretend like this opens up some new door for privacy concerns.
Ex. If Apple wanted to, they could watch us through our macbook cameras and listen to us all the time. But we trust that they don't. Same thing here.
no, not everyone does and i think reinforcing that belief is harmful because it makes people think they don't have a choice, when they really do.
there are a growing number of people who freely choose alternatives that respect their privacy/dignity/rights. i am one of those people. to the extent i can't control all data about me (e.g. to pay my taxes or get health insurance), that's pretty different than choosing to buy a consumer device designed to record and transmit your voice from inside of your home.
the commenter mentioned e-mail (self-hosted, though i can't control recipients' copies), files (offline drives/tahoe-lafs if needed), and operating systems (mostly debian without binary blobs).
my choices don't necessarily make me feel more secure--just was pointing out that not everyone is already trusting major tech companies with all of their data all of the time.
alternatives that better respect my privacy/rights/autonomy really do exist and people really do have choices. these choices are getting easier to make all the time, too, e.g. owncloud.
The main selling point of a macbook is not that it can identify exactly what you say, when you said it, and send that data back to a central server that is "always getting smarter". There is also a VERY big difference for me between the things that I type into my computer and the conversations I have in my home. I say many things in an imperfect form or with a dry sense of humor - I rarely save incomplete or out-of-context thoughts to a .pages file on Dropbox.
Who cares about what the selling point is? Neither Amazon Echo or Apple is claiming to secretly listen to your most intimate and private conversations, so it can report everything you say over to the NSA.
BUT, those are two devices that would have full capabilities to do so if they really wanted to.
The point is, we trust (or do not) that these services that have access to sensitive information -- are only doing what they CLAIM they are doing with regards to privacy.
100% - but the fact of the matter is that almost ALL the Echo does is analyze audio over remote servers. If Apple is doing it, it is covert and would upset a LOT of people if they found out.
I have one of these http://www.webcamerablocker.com/ on ALL of my devices with a camera, on my smartphones i've covered the cameras with a small square of duct-tape, on my laptops i've ripped out the microphone arrays or disconnected them and use the Mic input with a head-set if required.
I run my own mail server (although i hate having to email people @gmail.com etc) and i only store my emails locally. I don't use dropbox, i don't use cloud storage providers at all. When I have to upload things, I encrypt them first. I run almost everything through TOR, that includes all my web-browsing on my phone even.
There are a thousand ways that data can be collected about you these days given the technology we use, but I like to think i do a reasonable job at avoiding all of the bulk of them though. Nothing is perfect, but i'll be damned if i'm going to make it easy for anyone.
We all trust our e-mail to be stored in the cloud.
A lot of people have their own elaborate personal mail setups.
we store sensitive files etc on services like dropbox
A lot of people do not, and it is absolutely trivial not to (unlike say, being totally independent of webmail providers).
we trust that our operating systems aren't collecting/sending data
Trust is not created equal. For example, it is not a stretch at all for someone to think that OpenBSD is more trustworthy than Windows when it comes to security and privacy, and to sleep well at night with reasonable confidence as to the validity of that assertion.
I am asserting my belief that a large majority of people who voice privacy concerns over things like amazon echo are the same people who do in fact use many cloud services. I find it to be ironic if my assertion is true.
Furthermore, I think it all comes down to our perception, and our perception does not accurately reflect "potential to be misused". Our perception is that gmail, dropbox, facebook, apps which store data, etc. are all relatively low threat. However a device that is marketed to record our voices in our homes is perceive to be high threat. In reality though, the "potential to be misused" is present in ALL times we trust a 3rd party with access to our information, or even the potential ability to access our information, or cameras, or recording devices (including phones and laptops).
So like I said, it comes down to trust. Trust amazon or don't. Trust dropbox or don't. Trust your smartphones, or don't. Potential to be misused is equal among ANYTHING that has listening or recording capabilities built in to it.
There's a difference between people being able to steal data from your email or computer, and having something record everything you say in the "privacy" of your own home.
>Ex. If Apple wanted to, they could watch us through our macbook cameras and listen to us all the time.
Which reminds me that my Macbook camera is broken :'(
I recently bought into the Sonos ecosystem. While it is pretty limited in some ways (I can't just stream stuff playing on my phone to the Sonos speakers, for example if I am playing a random YouTube video), it has one really good thing going for it: it can sync playback between an arbitrary number of speakers. This is my new standard for this type of thing: speakers that cannot do this are inferior to Sonos. In that regard, their claim that it's also a wireless speaker doesn't appeal to me.
Having said that, this thing looks very cool. Imagine this, connected to a home automation system:
"Alexa, turn off lights in the kitchen."
"Alexa, arm the alarm system."
"Alexa, I am cold."
"Alexa, open the garage door."
"Alexa, start my car."
I know every comment here must mention privacy, so I'll follow the trend. Yes, it listens to you, and sends data to the cloud. However, I am still most likely going to buy one because, well, I can always unplug it.
Do home automation systems like this exist? I was very tempted to create a simple one using RPi and Python to control my lights and I did a cursory search and found nothing too impressive. I could see why this could be really expensive and thus not drive a lot of demand but it seems like something you see in most sci-fi movies that is very possible and a few rich people would enjoy.
I was just covering the sync thing with the guys in my office. In any large building you'll need multiple units to provide good coverage. They need to ensure these work in that context as well.
And it's incredibly hard to do without running wires. Just to cover the first floor of my house, I need 4-6 speakers. I am not willing to commit to wires for this, which is where Sonos shines.
And how long until this is the norm and we stop even talking about the privacy implications? How long after that point the notion of privacy stops existing?
Yes, this is the slippery slope to 1984. Do you carry a cell phone? Do you use a computer? Do you have windows? Do you ever leave your bunker with 4 foot concrete and steel walls? Yeah, your privacy is compromised already.
No, we won't stop talking about privacy because I said I can unplug this thing. Yes, I am excited about a new type of device coming out that is actually as cool as an iPad, or the Nest.
This could be the natural next step for one click shopping. Obviously it'll be more difficult without textual or visual capabilities, but things like "Add gelato to my shopping cart"(as apposed to shopping list) would be huge for Amazon fresh shoppers and other products that aren't too ambiguous.
Another application: "Alexa, order a Dominoes pizza with extra anchovies. "
The two main things I use Siri for are setting alarms ("Wake me at 7 tomorrow") and adding things to shopping (i.e., reminder) lists ("Add pasta to my Costco list").
It'd be kinda magic if I could say "Alexa, get me some toothpaste" (and have it know that I like Mr Sparkle Minty Fresh) and have that turn up on my doorstep the next day.
And I guess if it's always listening, it could build up a 'map' of when you're home. So it could schedule delivery of fresh stuff for when you're likely to be there.
It still requires a jump to the pc to order; but no reason they couldn't add a way to initiate an order from it. It's also a tad less privacy intrusive then echo.
Privacy is possibly becoming a generation gap issue; throw enough of these against the wall and people will just stop caring until they can quantize a real world impact
> people will just stop caring until they can quantize a real world impact
By which time it'll be way too late.
When all of your data is in all databases (rather than most of your data in some, as is now) and a Google search could result in some marketer cold-calling your landline about what you just searched, well... that'll be when people realize the outcome of the game they lost years ago.
Just like today it's way too late to stop the train of gay marriage acceptance. There are still a few crazy old people that rail against it though. Congratulations on being one of the crazy old people.
To clarify on this statement: the perception of privacy is important to some people, regardless of if the implementation is secure and truly private. So the assertion that people are concerned with it still remains true.
That in no way changes the fact that it is popular because consumers believe that it is. Consumers might not always be very bright when it comes to privacy and security, but the popularity of snapchat demonstrates that they do care.
That's not why it's popular today. It's popular because it's inconvenient to save messages, not because it's impossible. Nobody is under any illusion to the contrary.
Are you disagreeing with him? I'm pretty sure he's right. You can also be right, but it's hard to know because you seem to have put the least possible amount of effort into your comment.
What I'd really like to know is whether this thing will have some form of speaker recognition - identifying who is speaking, not just what is being said and further whether the learning functions will make that same distinction.
I have a family, including a small child. That's at least three people who would conceivably use this device.
Tech companies and Amazon in particular have been awful about these things. It took forever for Netflix to start accommodating multiple viewer households, the Kindle Fire shipped with no parental controls plus 1-click ordering and Android didn't add multiple user support until 4.2.
Echo needs all these things to be more than an experiment / gimmick.
(I notice this post fell directly to the middle of the page - not the typical behavior. Am I tripping some sort automatic moderation? Using the world 'gimmick' perhaps? Is this how posting 'height' works on popular / heavily commented stories? Just curious.)
You need to check out the Fire Tablet series again, they've made a big push in multiple profiles support. Household sharing allows you to share your digital purchases across your family. There is also FreeTime which is a special sandboxed kids profile.
That was an incredibly painful video to watch, what's wrong with just demonstrating the product's features in home environments? Why do we need these ads that make it seem like this "is a real conversation happening in a family home".
Perhaps we could put this video, the Samsung S3 launch party video and the Microsoft Windows 7 party video (where they discuss how much they love Windows whilst wearing party hats) together for the most cringeworthy video EVER?
Interesting how in the video the family has the Echo placed in about 3 or 4 different rooms (kitchen, living room, dining room, bedroom). Are they expecting people to buy multiple units or move it around the house?
This sounds like the creepiest tech product you could put in your home: an internet-connected microphone that can "hear you from across the room". Love the slick design, but I'll pass.
But the primary function of the Xbox is not to record data and send it back to its servers - the main selling point of the Echo is basically smart voice data analysis. Offline, an Xbox is still useful - the Echo becomes useless.
It's great to see Amazon using its huge profits to fund this kind of bleeding edge technology. (Maybe someday engineers will figure out how to squeeze this functionality into handheld devices.)
Surely it's just "ok google" or "siri" in a tabletop device. We already have this as an app in our phones. Doesn't seem to be a technological move forward just a re-packaging of currently available ideas.
The big idea here though is that Amazon can get entrenched as the first such domestic fixed device and then control the fulfilment for the shopping/wish/gift lists you make using their device.
Not an accountant, but I believe Amazon's "weak" profits are due to they reinvesting their profits back into the business, rather than accumulating cash.
The sarcasm doesn't make sense to me, because that's exactly what Amazon is doing (judgements on what's "bleeding edge" aside). Amazon could easily have massive profits if they weren't reinvesting it all.
So if I'm understanding the promotional video correctly, Alexa is listening to you while you have sex.
The best part must be how they represent the capabilities( cloud, always online, third party... ), through an incompetent parent, who isn't capable of understanding the concept. I'm paraphrasing: Cloud?, I've heard that word in the advertisement and it must be good for me.
And continuing by lying:
Quote: So it can just hear you anywhere? Yes, well anyone can hear you anyway.
Nobody except the people in the house you know and trust can hear you, with Echo, the potential listeners become an unknown.
This could be amazing for blind people and those who have difficulty with physical inputs.
That reminds me of a story I heard about the Kindle. Apparently it’s earliest success was with the vision-impaired. Before mass-market e-books, readers were limited to the few books that were available in large-print editions; thanks to the Kindle, nearly everything can be read in large type.
My grandfather, whom I believe never used a computer a day in his life, would have been an early adopter of both the Kindle and the Echo.
I had never thought of that, but it's true. My mum has diabetic retinopathy and used to use a laptop running at a blurry blurry non-native resolution (everything was MASSIVE). She struggled with the dark Vista theme and reading on a non-native resolution.
She bought an iPad4 and hasn't looked back. She dictates her emails and it really has helped her out significantly, including the use of Siri.
If this was for home automation, it would be a lot more useful.
Also I forgot to add, isn't it a little creepy that something is listening to your speech 24/7 without you consciously activating it? Like Kinect, it's probably pretty limited right now but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the trend.
In Amazon's defense, if you don't enable listening 24/7 then the customer loses convenience... so are you willing to trade more of your privacy for convenience?
I don't understand why we don't have more open source solutions for things like this. It's glorified voice search. Most of these Q-A systems are hand built to answer types of questions, with feedback loops for usage and ways to improve the system. I'm growing a little tired of these cloud-centric solutions that ultimately have their own company's interests at heart for ad-retargeting.
Amazon Echo seems like a step in the right direction towards ubiquitous comupting (+ AI). It reminds me of "Jarvis" from the Iron Man series.
I'd also be surprised if Google isn't concerned by this. Likes of Siri, Cortana have long been touted as Google-search killer, and I think something more advanced/powerful than Amazon Echo will have the potential to do just that.
I wonder if the Amazon Echo will constantly namedrop "Oracle" into everything as it's doing things like it did in Iron Man?
I am wondering what the backend is for this. If it's just going to recommend buying books or stuff from Amazon (like the main selling point on the Fire Phone is - "Look! You can SHOP from it") then it'll be a flop.
I hate the ad because fundamentally it is created on gender stereotypes. The boy wants to listen to rock music and the girl to dance numbers. The woman is cooking and wants to know tablespoon to teaspoon conversion. The man is waking up to go to work and wants to listen to the news. Argh! We are not in the Mad Men era!!
When I read dystopic cyberpunk novels as a child, I did not expect them to become reality so soon. Also, why do all AI have to tell you about mount everest all the time?
How long until Amazon.com ordering gets integrated into this?
For the sake of convenience, I've been shifting more and more of my shopping for "basics" like razors and toilet paper to Amazon, so they have know what brands I use. Pretty soon I'm sure I would be able to have an exchange just like this with Echo:
"Alexa, can you order me more razor blades?"
"Would you like to order 10-pack Gillette Fusion ProGlide razor blades for deliver tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Your order has been placed."
This seems like exactly what Amazon has been driving towards: lowering the friction involved in making a purchase to the point where you only need to utter two sentences at the moment you think about wanting or needing something. You don't even need to reach for you laptop or smartphone.
Good idea. I'm sure it's on the roadmap. Plus, I would use that. You're on the john and out of toilet paper. "Alexa, order my 10 rolls of Scott Brand toilet paper." Then, you just wait... Maybe the drone can even drop it through the window... Anyway, all kidding aside: I like the product, and would probably even use the ordering and I don't really see a problem with that at all.
This is so cool. It feels like the future, especially if it has the capability to control other devices in the home.
I think you could do some really exciting stuff with an SDK or an API. Even just the ability to tie actions to custom grammars would open it up for some cool hacks.
Really disappointed that privacy isn't even touched on. This thing will be listening to everything you say 24/7 and its not like you know who won't have free access to that data. For that reason I don't think I could ever buy it.
Other than the usual HN fear discussion, does anyone have any thoughts on the product itself? Doesn't offer any functionality that would be useful to the average person?
I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.
I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.
I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
I don't really understand the value behind this. It seems like voice recognition is the main feature behind it, but that doesn't create a reason for a product to exist. It's basically my smartphone, except I can't carry it in my pocket everywhere.
Even if the voice recognition is fantastic, it can't actually do anything useful. It's like selling a keyboard that doesn't work with any home computer or device. Maybe if I could control practically EVERYTHING with my voice, this would be neat, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Can I write an email with this? Control appliances? Voice control by itself isn't so amazing that I'll switch to a product inferior in its other features. What if I want to play/pause a song without speaking? Pick an artist and look through the albums or track titles? Read a wikipedia article and follow links to other related articles?
It's a (supposedly) superior way to access a limited amount of inferior applications. It's not a voice controller, which I would love to buy. It's a mediocre product which happens to have a voice interface.
Also, "Alexa, alarm off." really? You're telling me now I don't even have to roll over and smack something to sleep through my alarm clock?
Depending on the sound quality, I could possibly see it being useful as a fancy wireless speaker. But that's about it.
I would like it to read to me. My wakeup browsing headlines, my kindle ebook or names of recent Facebook postings.
I would like to replace my Clapper with it and add a connection to my coffee maker. [BION, the Clapper is one of our top gadgets so we do not have to roll over and turn off the bedroom lights].
I also would like it to respond to >1 name so different people can have different commands and/or meanings.
- some phone call without having to hold the phone.
- put that in the office and have quick responses to the classical technical question. It may act as replacement of a internal wiki for question like "What the IP of the sever?" or "What the syntax to add a column in SQL?".
I've had this idea sitting in the back of my brain for years, worked up some simple prototypes (just using computer's mic), the technology is already there and surprisingly simple (made simple for the layman by brilliant people)...
I've been working on a personal webapp using cmusphinx for trigger-word detection, google for the rest of the voice recognition, wit.ai for the NLP, and google again for the voice output. Works pretty well, but would probably give most of the privacy-wary folks here a heart attack. Planning on hooking it up to a monitor mounted in a picture frame on our wall.
Just looked at the Jasper project. The voice synthesizer sounds like crap compared to a product like Siri, and I suspect the voice recognition is worse too. I've coded on some the stuff using voice synthesis and recognition for fun, and it seems that the open source options haven't gotten any better for the past 15 years.
Well I think CMUSphinx and Julius have actually made leaps and bounds. Jasper is a thin layer built on top of those systems (sphinx in this case).
I guess I'm just easy to impress - I think the fact that we have off-the-shelf open source software that does voice recognition with any kind of quality is amazing.
And again, a lot of the time, it's about how well your model is trained. One of the ideas I had was to work training into the product, and have the user say sentences over time (maybe ~5 a week, at random times) to help the machine understand better (something like "hey, if you have a minute, let's work on our communication").
Also, even if the voice is a little bit computer-y, I don't mind, yeah you won't match on feature set right out of the gate, but I don't mind.
Also, there's an opportunity for advancement in that area -- if I were to build a site that collected voice/utterance samples from voice artists and had users pay a little bit for packs, I think we could fund the open-source teams doing the work to make more realistic voice/utterance.
I think of Jasper as a first step, but then again, I am biased, I like the idea and have been wanting to do it myself for a long time
I had been following the AI research of the Big Four ... but I did not see this one coming. That's pretty sneaky :-)
At this point, the technologies related to personal AIs seem to be fragmenting, similarly to when the sewing machines were being developed back in the mid-1850s. I will be interesting if it follows it through to the endgame, when patent owners come together into a patent pool and create a personal AI device that will change many things.
My favorite connected device is still an old iPad2 that I have connected to my TV. The advantages are:
1) The iPad has much better app support than most other TV connected devices. I can watch shows from Amazon, Hulu, HGTV, HBO, ... even the olympics have been well supported. The only issue I have is that there is no remote, and I don't see a good path to adding one.
2) I am a little less worried about privacy issues with it. Apple already has all of my emails, so the thought of them potentially listening to my living room with a connected device that has been well researched over the last few years isn't too big a concern.
3) The cost is low. For an older device that I no longer carry I would call it free. If you don't have a hand-me-down iPad to connect to the TV then the start at $300 new including an HDMI adapter, and you can find a used one much cheaper.
4) It is also a perfectly functional tablet incase you want to carry it around and look at the internet or something. It is old enough that new games are an issue, but it is fine otherwise.
5) It is already connected to the iCloud account with my shopping list, etc on it, so it can actually add things to a list or calendar that I use.
6) "Hey Siri", works well for me, and is enough to play the occasional song, or check wikipedia facts if I need one.
7) My dog is named Alexa, not Siri, so no conflict there.
Then again, other than the occasional electronic product I am pretty frugal. I know I am not a good target market for anything, so Amazon shouldn't try too hard to sell me on this. I think my old iPad is already working well as a better version of both the Fire TV and Echo.
> The only issue I have is that there is no remote, and I don't see a good path to adding one.
And that is the nail in the coffin for tons of users. If I have a device connected to my TV, and have to get up to open an app, play, pause, etc. that is a huge problem.
My favorite connected device is a cheap box running windows. I can watch shows from Amazon, Hulu, HGTV, HBO, olympics. It has two remotes (media remote and a wireless kb/mouse combo), I can beam youtube videos to it from my phone, watch any flash based video players, and can use the "full" internet easily. The only thing it's missing is some sort of siri/cortana/echo functionality, although I'm guessing that I could add it with some work.
Definitely. I would say that an 'app-store'-like way for users to add extra capabilities to the device provided by third parties is going to be crucial to the success of this (or similar) devices.
Hopefully they'll go a step further and develop a whole toolkit to help developers write software with natural language interfaces.
I'd imagine you could hack it in if it's not present - "Alexa open webpage dim.lights.kitchen.home" and have your home server use the request hit to tell the lights to go off. Of course an open API would be far nicer.
I call it the "must do something" syndrome.
Vps and managers at some point just "do stuff" to justify being employed and salary. So that means pooping out new products, doesnt matter if its great as long as it sounds like theres a remote chance for it to work.
This is generally where the CEO has to come in and say "no more" - but thats not always that easy. Politics, etc.
I am an Indian who speaks with slight accent(not real thick, but admittedly there is some) and I am yet to use a voice recognition service that works for me.
Frankly I despair at future of Voice recognition based services which target a very narrow demography. You would hope things would improve with time, but nope. Does anyone else who isn't a native English speaker has seen this problem?
I'm a native English speaker. I'm British. I have minimal regional accent (to the point where people find it difficult to pinpoint where in the UK I'm from.) I'm not far off RP and I'm still yet to find a service that gives me high accuracy.
Don't despair, it's going to improve eventually but it takes time. Those companies need to put effort into training their services specifically for accented speech - in the same way they do it for child voices etc. I'm pretty sure it's already on their roadmap!
I used to have it (French accent) on Google voice search, until mid-2013. Nowadays the same service works really well for me, so they definitely improved something.
Why does Amazon think people want these products? If I want to search stuff like that I would use my smartphone that is always with me. If I want to search with my voice, then I'll use the voice search found on my smartphone. Why would someone want a device that is always actively listening? Why would I pay 200$ for something that my smartphone already does?
This is in the same vein as the question "why would I want a web browser on my phone? Why wouldn't I just use the web browser on my desktop computer?"
As to why you'd want a device that is listening - and does something when its triggered - is that you can arbitrarily activate it with your voice. For example, if your hands are full, or dirty, because maybe you're cooking or changing the oil in your car, or cataloging the stuff you have stored in your garage.
It doesn't take too much imagination to see why Amazon would invest in creating such a product.
I think it's about putting it out there and seeing how people behave around it (when it's on the desk, kitchen etc). The idea isn't novel, you had virtual assistants do such "tasks" 5-8 years ago (and Timothy Ferris would write a best seller about it), but Amazon's made a laudable effort to build a humanoid to test it further. You have to remember Jeff Bezos has kept Mechanical Turk going for a reason, I wouldn't be surprised if Echo and MTurk combine into something very powerful.
Or maybe I'm wrong and this is just so Amazon can feel special, relevant (next to Google and Apple) and keep its share prices high to motivate human resources so they can continue selling and shipping warehouse inventory.
I think this actually supports the point.
People don't know what they want. People often find great use for things that don't seem useful at first, and vice-versa.
This is the first time I'm seeing a strong foray into the home where information technology becomes usable in a communal environment. Other products from Kickstarter [1][2] have been picking away at this but not with the elegance or backing from a big player like Amazon. Privacy issues aside I think this is where most people want to see technology moving toward. It's aspirational and aligns incentives among developers, technologists, and futurists. Although this may not be perfect the first time around, I am happy we are moving in this direction.
So the product is named "iPhone" but you ask it questions by calling it "Siri"? You don't buy a Cortana either, you buy a product named "Windows Phone" (?).
What's odd to me is that Alexa is way more common name for humans than Siri is. I wonder what false positives will do for households with a human Alexa.
If the recognition algorithm works the way I believe it does, it's looking for silence before the keyword, indicating it's the start of a question and "Alexa" is the subject:
e.g. "Alexa, how many people live in Germany?"
and not
"I should talk to Alexa about ordering ten new televisions."
Can't think of a lot of sentences that start with "ecological".
My guess would be that they can switch the name of either if needed in the future (to rebrand or whatnot). This isn't that dissimilar from the iPhone's Siri, or Window's Cortana.
Sorry, I should have made my sentence clearer: as in you have a wife/daughter/friend/girlfriend in the room who happens to be called Alexa, along with this new Amazon device. Hilarity ensues ;-)
I personally just marvel at the implications of opening up an API for it.
Imagine playing Youtube workout playlists, or powering up other devices through it, it could certainly be the voice hub of the house.
It's one giant step towards the enablement of the "internet of things" for the household.
Amazon Echo reminds me that I'd really like a physical on/off switch for the microphone[] on my next mobile phone.
I doubt that there will be one available that has such a switch, however.
--
[] Switches for the camera, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM would also be great
After just now hearing about Amazon Echo, I positively, absolutely cannot be the only person who immediately thought of this show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
This all reminds me of "AutoPC" from Clarion in the late 90's[1]. A friend of mine had it in his truck, it truly was amazing at the time -- he could make phone calls, play music, render maps on his display, you name it, all hands free on a tiny little SH-3 processor running windows CE (yes, remember that?!) under his seat.
It's sad it really hasn't progressed very far -- Essentially, we've moved on to cloud-hosted audio analytics to handle better speech recognition, but the usage of the thing really hasn't changed.
That sounds a really interesting device, thanks. I too have noticed that voice recognition has been shifted "to the cloud" despite the improvement in local processing power; even 15 year old Nokias had voice recognition of some sort (BLUETOOOOTH you would shout), and old single-core PCs had Dragon Naturally Speaking working on them; I am sure modern devices have more processing power (and storage).
Interesting, I didn't know that AutoPC had actually gone anywhere. I was at a WinCE Developer Conference in London where it was presented, and the voice recognition completely failed to work on-stage in a large, hushed auditorium. Given that it was supposed to work in a car, with road noise, it didn't impress anyone (that I could see).
At a macro vantage point, this is cool and great. On a micro-economic standpoint I don't need the convenience and I don't want the privacy risk. I would rather download all of wikipedia weekly and pay $500 for the voice recognition software under my control. I think there is some great first world problem potential, but it auto updates and I have little control. If something went screwy on Windows, people would notice it very quickly - there are suits in corporations watching and reviewing these things. On consumer grade electronics only enthusiasts and security researchers would know if something went funny.
You can? Cool, that fixes everything. But still, I feel like its pretty annoying that they made it the default, simply because it will be annoying for so many people.
If people buy and use this, I imagine a future version will work hard to detect if your questions are being directed at it without you having to prefix the request with a keyword like "Alexa".
E.g. If you ask a question and it doesn't hear anybody else respond within a certain amount of time. Or it could use additional sensors to detect if you're alone when you say something out loud, and whether or not you're shouting to somebody else in another room. It wont be perfect obviously and will sometimes look stuff up when it wasn't supposed to.
Well hang on - doesn't my iPhone already do all this? And presumably so does the Android equivalent? I appreciate this will have much better microphone technology but it still seems a little redundant.
A couple differentiators:
-The speaker in Echo is presumably much better
-The microphone in Echo is presumably much better
-On most Android phones (I don't know about iPhone), you have to wake the phone up before you can talk to it
If your iPhone is plugged in to power, you can trigger Siri by saying "Hey Siri". I believe this is off by default and there's a settings switch for it.
Yep, exactly my thoughts. With Siri and Google voice, why do I need to buy another piece of hardware. Amazon could have integrated all of this in kindle or amazon phone if they really wanted to.
I have found both android and iOS implantation to be quite poor at hearing you from afar or in any kind of noise. I was actually hoping someone would make a product like this, with much better microphones so it could hear me anywhere. Also, for battery concerns, you should only use always on listening on your phone when plugged in.
I'm guessing it will initially be more of a speaker with some voice command capabilities before it is regarded as a full-blown Siri. There's definitely some value in not having to fiddle around with a phone to listen to music/radio. And then the mind wanders.
This is going to have better microphones and a better speaker, suitable for listening to music in a medium sized room it seems. Also your phone can't hear you from across the room.
The privacy problem is much deeper than this device. The reason we have to scream privacy for every new product is that the cloud services providing the functionality for all these devices have been shown over and over to disregard and actively abuse our privacy. Until our networks and ISPs and cloud data companies support anonymous encrypted data and services, we simply cannot trust these types of devices.
These speech search endpoints should have open APIs so that we can use our own hardware and software. I want to guarantee that whatever device I might ultimately use for such a service isn't openly listening. That would also enable usage of whichever search provider you prefer without needing new vendor-specific hardware. But the first of these benefits is by and large the most important of the two.
More than likely the noise cancelling is also cancelling out the music it's playing, so I think it wouldn't matter.
Several years ago I was playing with a USB speakerphone module from Yamaha that had hardware noise cancelling. It was so good that even with loud music playing via the device the party on the other end only heard my voice and it was crystal clear. It was cancelling out the music totally.
hopefully they let you change that "magic" word (alexa seems too common)... and more importantly, I hope that it doesn't send any data online unless that word was recognized locally with a very low false positive rate
If it is as intelligent as "computer" on Star Trek (which didn't get confused when you finished giving it commands yet would struggle with some commands "SPECIFY PARAMETERS"), then it'll be great!
I just hope its EPS conduits don't keep exploding all the time like on TNG. Or the bio-gel packs don't get infected like Voyager..... OK a bit sad I know
FWIW, you can experience some of this right now. Connect a plugged-in iPhone to a bluetooth speaker and enable "Hey Siri." I did this the other day and it's pretty neat. Of course in my case, my phone was across the room and once I started playing some music I lost control over it... Seems echo fixes that problem though I'd be curious to see how well that works.
Verbatim? I just tried two off the top of my head. "Hey Siri, how do you spell cantaloupe?" and "Hey Siri, how tall is mount everest?" The replies were "The answer is cantaloupe" with an on-screen definition and "I've found an article on Wikipedia about that. Shall I read it?" In neither case were the answers succinct and on point as in the Echo ad.
Of course, that assume it will actually work as advertise. Also, unless I'm mistaken, "Hey Siri" requires your phone be plugged in. My phone is never plugged in unless I'm turning in for the night. I realize Echo has to be plugged in as well, but that is it's natural state, having my iPhone plugged in is not.
The problem with voice recognition software that doesn't require a physical action like pressing a button (Siri) is that they do a terrible job at distinguishing between when your actually trying to talk to it and when you or audio/video say(s) something in conversation to someone else/playback that might sound like the command keyword.
This is awesome. I have a MotoX with always on listening, but I only use that aspect of it at home. Since the phone is optimized for close proximity listening it often doesn't work when its slightly far away. If the voice recognition works as well as they say it will, then this could be really useful.
You're sitting around talking to a friend, you ask some small questions like, "is it supposed to rain tomorrow?" or "what was the name of that guy in that movie with the thing?" and your technology responds before your friend can. Especially if your friend is named Alexa.
I'd love one! Rooted, acting as a high quality wifi microphone . If TTS is handled locally (doubtful) I'd love to tap into that as well, it sounds very nice.
This might be the new Kinect, a device least used for what it was originally intended. Fingers crossed, we might be getting a great microphone!
Couldn't a similar technology be developed for any bluetooth speaker paired to a phone? Most bluetooth speakers also have a microphone, so software running on the phone could listen for a wakeup word (a la "Ok Google"). Then just tie into siri or Google search?
Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music
I usually have trouble with the Kinect 2's microphone while I'm playing music or watching TV. It's nice that Amazon is concerned about this. Does anyone know how many microphones the Kinect has?
Amazon bought True Knowledge which became Evi (still available on iOs,etc). Now they made a speaker that allows you to access Evi which is all this is.
Privacy issues aside, this is just a dumb SIRI clone that is always listening.
I'm kind of disappointed that they're not using neodymium magnets on the drivers for this, but I guess, given that it doesn't have an internal battery, the heavier / less-efficient drivers don't really hurt it.
Does anybody know what Amazon Echo will be using as their search engine - Google, Bing? Or is Amazon developing their own search/knowledge engine? If so, is this just the beginning of Amazon trying to encroach on Google Search?
Very interesting device. I just fear that they will lock it down' like it's the 90's and would come with no open API. And then of course the security stuff... but that's everywhere now ...
Hopefully it'll let you program your word trigger keyword -- 'Alexa' is one syllable too many IMO. Also, somebody out there is bound to have a crazy ex-girlfriend by the same name :]
Everyone talks about privacy. My biggest problem is that even with those 5 or 10 functions, Alexa is still pretty much useless.
Suddenly needing to know the height of Everest while crossing the room? Yeah, that happens so much.
No, it's just that they don't have the slightest idea how to make it be useful because it only works on pattern questions like "What is the height of X ?" or "Put Y on the grocery list".
I am sure the list of allowed phrase templates is pretty limited. That's what disappoints me about Alexa, Siri, Google voice and other assistants.
Still waiting for HAL-9000 with its amazing conversation skills.
Alexa: "You've used the word 'love' 3 times today, shouldn't I not order you no cases of champagne? Respond 'order this' or 'order this later'."
[...]
Alexa: "The Zambezi river is over 2500km long. If you want to cancel the booking I've made for you for a luxury all expenses paid family trip to the Zambezi then recite your 35 digit lock code now."
Alexa: "You gave me 5 7-digit bar codes, these items are now on your shopping list. Say anything to confirm this purchase."
Alexa: "I'm sorry could you repeat that?"
Alexa: "I'm sorry did you say 'I'm a booger eater'?"
Alexa: "I'm waiting for your response, please speak loudly and clearly."
It's unfortunate it doesn't have a battery. For this price point it would have made a great bluetooth speaker with some extra intelligent assistant functionality.
There might be some interest from the DIY people to hack the hardware/software. But I am not sure if there will be interest from general consumers for this product.
It would be nice if this thing could read eBooks or at least play Audiobooks from Amazon. If they add this feature (and remove some of the creepy stuff), i'm sold.
I have my old CD collection ripped to .wav and served up via DLNA device. It would be nice if Echo worked with DLNA devices so I did not have to redo all this work.
semi interesting. Now if this becomes part of a home ecosystem then it could significantly increase its value. Such as if i can talk to it and then my amazon drone goes and gets me some food, or even gets amazon fresh to bring me groceries.
We've now got Microsoft (XBox One), Amazon (Echo), Google/Motorola (Moto X) and maybe others who want to place some kind of "always-on" microphone in our houses. They all say the same thing, sure - that the microphone won't be listening to your conversations, that it won't be sending the data to any other servers, etc. Do we believe them? And will they change those policies in the future? Do they even have real control over the devices, or will they be hacked?
1984 was such an underestimation of the potential power of a surveillance society.
To be fair, the portable devices are not yet monitoring all conversations due to battery life constraints. If it were a wall powered device, I would be very wary of it, but until then it seems highly unlikely it can achieve that behavior and not drain the battery in a noticeable way.
I want one of these, but then the NSA may be listening to me. Plus, I don't have electricity. It started when I thought that the NSA had bugged my computer, so I got rid of my computer. Later on, I knew those shifty guys would bug my house, so I sold my house and moved to the forest. But in the forest, I knew they trained the squirrels to report in on my status to them.
Jokes on them, I have the squirrels trained as double agents and send them to do things like type in HN comment posts via a public library computer.
- it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good.
- it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would be much more socially pleasant.
- it can stream music without the hassle of bluetooth. Bluetooth streaming becomes less convenient when you don't know which of the many computers, phones or tablets were used to start the music, or where it is...
- my three year old can probably figure out how to use it
Thought I'd throw those out there, and start a "positive" thread. This discussion is overwhelmingly negative. Lots of good points being made in the negative comments, but there are some nice positives, too.