Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?

posted by fyngyrz on Sunday April 01 2018, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the IGNORE-ME dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

There is patent activity afoot to cover Alexa and Google Assistant mining for more than activation words:

Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like "Hey, Alexa" or "O.K., Google." But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person's desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations.

For many, this could change the landscape as to whether these devices are acceptable. It may also open the door wider for open-source, less invasive devices such as Mycroft.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 32 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 01 2018, @07:48PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 01 2018, @07:48PM (#661213) Journal

    That is not quite true. It appears that Mycroft is heavily reliant on being "paired", that is, registered. It is also pretty reliant on being internet connected, to make use of various services, such as the wikipedia. BUT - browsing the forums, I found this thread - https://community.mycroft.ai/t/how-would-i-go-about-using-mycroft-without-internet-access-use-of-cloud-services/3323 [mycroft.ai]

    KathyReid
    13d

    So, a couple of pieces here;

            A Wake Word or a Hot Word are the same thing - they are a phrase that the Precise (which Mycroft now uses by default) Wake Word listener uses to flag that the next Utterance should be an Intent

            Mycroft is designed to pair with home.mycroft.ai - if you want to remove this dependency, you will essentially need to decouple Mycroft from home.mycroft.ai. We don’t have any documentation on this but we know a couple people have done this before.

            Mycroft contacts several online services - depending on STT configuration. If the STT is cloud based, then this would be one of them. Calls to home.mycroft.ai would be another. If a Fallback Intent is triggered, like Wolfram or Wikipedia, then that would be another.

    Long story short, preventing your mycroft from connecting is possible, although, some functionality will be difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

    It all depends on what you have in mind. Mycroft may or may not be a working "solution" for your needs.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @08:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @08:05PM (#661223)

    Exactly. You will lose the small, simple functionality of speech recognition. Which is, like, the whole point of the whole thing.

    Yes, you can replace the speech recognizer. With a different speech recognizer running on somebody else's servers. Doh.

    Hint: the number of freely available speech recognizers which you can run locally is less than three. And none of them work very well once you go beyond two handful of words. Even under ideal conditions. And they're a royal pain to get running.