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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday May 15 2018, @12:17PM
from the increased-interest-in-the-names-Blexa,-Clexa,-and-Dlexa dept.
from the increased-interest-in-the-names-Blexa,-Clexa,-and-Dlexa dept.
'Alexa' has become a less popular baby name since Amazon launched Echo
Amazon started widely selling its Echo speaker, voiced by the Star Trek-inspired personal assistant Alexa, in 2015. That year, 6,050 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa, or 311 for every 100,000 female babies born.
Since then, the name has declined in popularity 33 percent, according to new data from the Social Security Administration crunched by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen. Last year, just 3,883 baby girls were named Alexa.
Nobody wants to name their baby after their digital slave.
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"Alexa" Baby Name Falls in Popularity Since Release of Amazon's Smart Speakers
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F.S. Fitzgerald to Hemingway:
"Ernest, the rich are different from us."
Hemingway:
"Yes. They have more money."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:50PM
There it is.
You could use an open source implementation that runs on your computer, like Mycroft [wikipedia.org]. You could allow your digital assistant (running on your computer) to access Internet resources and databases on your terms, and also provide information for it to use locally, such as a downloaded offline copy of Wikipedia (no need to keep the images and video, and storing it locally on an SSD will allow it to be read faster).
If you do want to use a digital assistant run remotely by Google, Amazon, etc., maybe you could use it only a device in which you know that you control access to the microphone. So you use a desktop application rather than a smart speaker, and you turn your microphone on before using it, and off when you're done.
In the future, digital assistants could become a lot more useful. Machine learning hardware, including GPUs or more customized options like TPUs, could be used locally to accelerate the digital assistant. You won't have the full power of the "cloud", but it's not clear that you will need it. Google and others are trying to move AI functions on to the devices themselves to reduce latency, something they are calling "edge computing" [soylentnews.org]. But that doesn't mean it's not spying on you. So use AI on your own terms.
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