I really like the sound quality of Amazon’s newest Echo Dot generation compared to it size and price.
However, in my experience Alexa is still pretty stupid. The only things it does well, is to play music, switch lights and read Wikipedia articles.
The one thing I'm scared of is Alexa sending everything it hears to Amazon, and not only things I said after the trigger word. I know for a fact, Alexa constantly records even today, because it can filter "trigger word in the middle of a sentence" scenarios, when no actual request is intended. I really do hope, that only actual requests (or false-positives) are currently sent to the AWS cloud.
If that won’t be the case anymore in the future, I’ll be out.
I spent some time taking apart how Alexa must work myself. My thinking on this is guided by the fact that there are only a handful of Wake Words available. Given that there are only 4, I'm thinking the ability to recognize those Wake Words is in firmware on the device (such tech was commercially available back in 1995 when I played with a demo piece of hardware that did just that). Decoding a wake word from a stream of audio locally on the device without making a persistent recording of it or sending a recording off-device is fine with me.
However the more complex parsing of what ever comes after the Wake Word needs to be sent off as an audio stream to some cloud operation for parsing where more horsepower is available. This also seems quite reasonable to me. Sure, it could be done on the device but this would mean a hotter CPU on the device and a generally more expensive Alexa. Certainly no more $29 Echo Dots.
Is Alexa listening all the time? Hell yes it is! Is Alexa recording everything you say, everything you watch on TV, every time the dog barks and sending it back to Amazon for archival? Its possible but consider the economics of storing that much data as audio. Storage is cheap but thats quite a burden. Is AMZN keeping a parsed version of everything it hears from your device and dumping the raw audio version? Its technically possible but again, consider the economics of such a thing.
Not to mention, how many Alexas are going to be sold after someone here posts smoking gun proof Alexa is constantly or even at some batched interval sending off large chunks of data which are in fact full voice recordings?
I'm not going to waste my time on this experiment but anybody who is good with Wireshark could perform an analysis to quickly disprove this whole notion.
You have to be careful not to conflate two things. It is immediately obvious that Alexa "is always listening" -- after all, how could it know you are about to utter the wake word? So, in a sense, the device is listening to you at all times.
That, however, is separate from a concern that the device is streaming your data back at all times. The implementation could easily locally listen for the wake word, record your utterance, and only stream/process that part of it. It can, in a sense, listen at all times but only tell Amazon what you actually want it to tell Amazon. Which, AFAIK, is how the device works. That doesn't, of course, mean that it works flawlessly or that things are captured which you don't intend it to capture, which is a fact that has also been covered extensively by the media reporting on Alexa.
Disclaimer: AWS employee, not remotely related to any Alexa work
From the public record you can actually be pretty certain that Alexa doesn't send anything back to Amazon other than actual requests (and false positives). There was a murder trial a few years ago where an Alexa may have grabbed some audio of the murder. A judge ordered Amazon to turn over anything they may have, and Amazon said they didn't receive any requests during that time period, and they don't get any recordings other than those requests. So Amazon has effectively stated, under threat of criminal prosecution, that they don't record anything other than those requests.
I like small phones. So I own a tablet for all the personal stuff at home. I use my PC for work, my Phone for messaging and travel and my tablet for everything else. It’s really the most comfortable way of consuming.
This is the most overdue feature of Twitter. Since ages.
I have no idea, why they do not offer a global show/hide retweets option. If you follow a couple of hundred accounts—like I do—having retweets enabled pretty much ruins your entire timeline.
If you don't want to give full access to all your data, check out https://starthq.com. We do federated search from the client via an extension. There's also an API which lets you add support for any service you want: https://starthq.com/developers
We haven't been actively working on it for a while, so have been considering open sourcing it. If anyone is interested in helping out with that or has ideas as to how to monetize this, drop me a line (hello@starthq.com).
Have you also considered the Pillar Project's approach? They too struggled for funding, but I rather like the connection among blockchain technology, ICO funding, and personal data tools. I think the inversion of control that these efforts are seeking is what society needs in order to have a more healthy relationship with companies (and governments).
This would be such a nice app if it was local-only. Like, there's no reason for it not to be...
You could have the index created locally or even just do remote calls for search to the respective API's. There's really no reason for this to be cloud-based. Maybe access token synchronization, but in this case, I think setting up all accounts on each device I have once... wouldn't be much of a trouble compared to giving them access to all my storage everywhere.
You know, it's creepy for a single person too though. I know you're storing only metadata to build an index, but that is still a lot and I think for most it causes a big feeling of unease.
In my opinion your service would be great if it were fully-local. This would also open up the path to full-text search for documents, without being creepy. I'm not expecting you to do that for free of course, I mean as a paid product. (Haven't dug into your current pricing details)
That said, the need for something like this almost outweighs the cost. But I so agree w/ what you're saying. That was my first thought—uh—so. much. access.
Before I sign up, I'd want to know what's safe, where, and why.
Hey there, happy to answer any questions you might have.
Diamond's working to make permissions more granular and transparent with each release. Some quick points:
* we don't store the files themselves, only the metadata the service provides (e.g. file names, collaborators, paths)
* we don't store service passwords (authentication is handed back to the service itself
* we do on-prem installs for corporate customers and we'd consider a version of it for pro as well.
We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously. Happy to take some feedback on how we can improve trust.
Hi! Great reply - this is how you earn early adopters trust. At the potential cost of giving away your "secret sauce", I'd highly recommend being as transparent as possible about what you do and what you don't do to people's data. There's a huge need for your service, but as most of the comments here point out - be f'n careful.
> We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously.
This statement is unforutnately, NOT how you earn people's trust. Presumably your early adopters are technically inclined. Guess what, they don't care if you say "we take it seriously", they want you to show why you take it seriously. Furthermore, any large financial institution (for example) is going to say the same thing. Sure your sales guy says "we take it seriously", but you're not going to win any deals if you don't pass their security audit.
I'm also to worried about giving full access to my emails but I don't think that makes me a scared person. I think wrorrying here is perfectly fine and understandable.
isn't this an app like Rambox which is effectively a glorified web browser? That one at least only opens the web interfaces of the various chat and email applications out there right now, it doesn't store (or claims not to) any credentials itself. Doesn't need to either. I mean it'd have to implement authentication for all those services, which is hard to scale.
I think we're different from Rambox in the sense that we're not trying to emulate the in-service experience for many services in our own our app. Instead, the idea is create an access point to take you to the file, email or insight with less effort. As for authentication, that's handed off to the service a user is trying to authenticate (e.g. Google Accounts).
While I completely understand the problem, I do not like your solution. To me it doesn’t look as good as the original and takes away a lot of space for information within the notification itself.
I’d rather build in a hidden timer, so taps on a notification only trigger an app change after a certain amount of time. E.g. 0.5 seconds after it popped up.
Another problem they didn't consider for this solution, is the people that tap the midde of the status bar to scroll to the top. With that solution, I still go into "agony"-mode.
They didn't think of that. I guess in the same way that Apple didn't think of the problem presented in that post.
However, in my experience Alexa is still pretty stupid. The only things it does well, is to play music, switch lights and read Wikipedia articles.
The one thing I'm scared of is Alexa sending everything it hears to Amazon, and not only things I said after the trigger word. I know for a fact, Alexa constantly records even today, because it can filter "trigger word in the middle of a sentence" scenarios, when no actual request is intended. I really do hope, that only actual requests (or false-positives) are currently sent to the AWS cloud.
If that won’t be the case anymore in the future, I’ll be out.