When I was younger, I dreamed of something like this. Voice control for my home! A Star Trek computer that I can interact with conversationally! I just say what I want and it happens!
Now, I just see an internet-connected microphone in a software black box which I can only interpret as a giant frickin' security liability. I want this, but unless it's open source top-to-bottom, I won't ever actually put one in my home. We know too much about how these things can be abused for me to ever seriously consider it without being able to verify for myself what it's doing and why.
The Free Software Foundation, in its texts, often uses the phrase "the free world" to mean the realm of computing without proprietary restrictions, surveillance, etc.
Approximately since Snowden, I've become more and more convinced about both the fragility and the value of this free world.
And today, I basically see the tech giants as colossal enemies.
Career-wise, henceforth I will avoid proprietary systems and dedicate myself to working on privacy-enabling free software, even if I make less money.
Many people in the free software movement have had more foresight and ethical intelligence than me, and I salute them! It's only recently that I'm able to start formulating my techno-political views in a coherent and strong way.
Now, looking at a device like this, I automatically compare it to something like a tractor or plow. It demands constant connectivity to Google HQ... it's full of secret code... it requires, for its basic paradigm, a private company's acquisition of staggering amounts of surveillance... and so on.
When I think about what to work on, a guiding question for me now is "What would Google not do?"
Don't be. I think it was very well said, and while I've been a bit of a Free Software hippie for a while it keeps hitting me over and over just how far ahead they saw.
It's amazing to me that free software is still strong after all of these years. I can remember back in the early 90s being fed propaganda from my college professors about "the communist" Stallman and his friends. They had made plenty of enemies back then and countless more since. Yet, they kept to their principles and moved things forward to the benefit of billions of people.
But do you think that free software can keep up against these giants? In the near future, it will all be about having large amounts of data, and processing power; it will be less and less about the actual algorithms.
I'm afraid the only way out will be to rethink the economy.
I think a neat solution is home-serving. A little box with big storage which acts as a hub for your family's digital life. It relays all your devices, gathers all info they're spitting out, and works on it. Results are fed back to the UIs.
When you're out and about, your devices tunnel home automatically, knowing the endpoint is trustworthy (which is more than can be said about traditional VPNs). All your photos, tweets, posts, and all other brain farts straying into the open world are never sent out directly by the device they were produced on, but by the server at home instead.
Tor could finally work as intended, with millions of boxes in the network, all handling each other's traffic. Add new projects like IPFS, and the whole centralised cloud bullshit starts to crumble. Not just from a privacy pov, but features. Your home box talking to the neighbours' home boxes by itself is a whole lot more powerful than all parties meeting on some obscure server somewhere, although I find myself quickly coming back to privacy when thinking about advantages. I do hope there is room for other big features, otherwise getting this box into peoples' hands will prove difficult.
I see it as a kind of decentralised centralisation: your whole digital life is based on this one machine, but it's in your home, you own it, and you can do with it whatever the heck you want. No ads (!), no monetization of your private data, which stays in your hands at all times, except of course once you share. Still, then it will be in the hands of those you shared it with, and hopefully not huge corporations with little incentive to do no evil (who the hell thought this was an appropriate company motto?).
Most everything for which we turn to Google and Facebook can be done much more privately at home (office things, communication, sharing shit...), except maybe search. I have little problem in keeping Google as a search machine (they do a great job) once they stop waiting for me at every. single. corner, and following me around the bits inbetween. Decentralised search is hard, but I'm fairly optimistic once a basis is laid out, someone smart takes on the challenge (and is able to solve it, too!).
Regarding your last sentence, rethinking our economy isn't a bad idea in any case. Capitalism is fundamentally unfit to be a fair system, and if a socially fair system is what we want, we have to get rid of some ideas (like this infinite growth nonsense, or that education is obsolete. Education, in whatever shape or form, is the only way I know of how humanity is not going to spiral to its (intellectual) death).
Search is cool, but Google-style universal search might be a bit overrated.
Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic.
I mean, a competent librarian has a kind of expertise that Google's algorithms don't, so that's one situation to explore for a post-Google idea of finding information (of course it's also pre-Google).
The social aspect of information discovery is something that Google and Facebook are kind of fighting over, but fundamentally it doesn't belong to them—it belongs to "us" intrinsically.
They shut down Google Reader but they can't shut down the human tendency to share information!
And the panopticon information provided by Google is often just a mesmerizing massive overload with no curation, weight, intelligence...
Wikipedia is the top hit for so many searches that one could see Google as an interface for it. Add Wikivoyage/Wikitravel, some other community wikis, API interfaces a la DuckDuckGo, social curation, etc, and you might find that the value of Google Search is actually not that incredible.
Yes, google certainly isn't the best we can do in terms of finding stuff, but I think the sheer amount of data they're gathering enables the algorithms to appear more intelligent than they really are by processing more instead of better (as you say, there is little to no curation going on).
This is one of the main reasons I think home serving is a great idea. It enables people with some interest in one another to connect directly, one-to-one, instead of running around in some third party's server. This opens possibilities for exchange and networking on a very personal basis that we don't have today mostly because of privacy concerns (virtual neighbourhoods and the like).
>Tor could finally work as intended, with millions of boxes in the network, all handling each other's traffic.
Ultimately you'll never escape the fundamental flaw of Tor, which is that I, as a moderate bandwidth user, don't want to subsidize some leech's desire to download weird fetish porn in 4K with my connection.
I live in Canada where the scumbag broadband companies all collude to keep prices exorbitantly high, and I pay a lot of money for what would be considered bottom-tier garbage service in e.g. South Korea.
I don't run Tor because ultimately I want to use the bandwidth I pay for.
>Decentralised search is hard, but I'm fairly optimistic once a basis is laid out, someone smart takes on the challenge (and is able to solve it, too!).
I agree. The current trend of outsourcing everything to "the cloud" is partially fashion, partially laziness, and mostly dictated by business models - why do something the right way (from engineering point of view), when you can lock your users up in your own garden and extract rent (either directly, or by spamming them with ads and selling their data)?
Our devices have incredible amount of computing power now - a great untapped potential that we could use for something else than for supporting unnecessary indirection layers.
The problem is that our devices are locked up behind NAT routers and IPv6 is starting to resemble fusion power in terms of its ETA.
The future of all of our devices having extremely fast connections existing in a world of amazing, free, peer-to-peer applications still seems so far away.
I agree. But business models are not created equal. Personally, I'd like more of those giving useful technology and less of those that are artificially limiting it.
The challenge is how do we make it economically viable for both the producer of the technology and the end user to keep it useful and local, while also making it a good user experience?
The thing about cloud-based services is that they leverage scale well, making many things cheaper than they ever could be locally unless you buy a device and use it for long time AND fixes can be rolled out quickly with no lagging install base to cause problems or bad user experiences.
I really do want to have my privacy and keep my data safe but I also recognize that's hard to do without higher cost or more hassle (or both).
If you can check all of those for an FOSS solution, then I think you are home. Unfortunately most of the points are still not available for average Joe users with FOSS.
Add to that, most people will give you a blank look when you start discussing how companies own your data, and even those who understand just shrug and go the route of least resistance.
It's also worth building networks of free systems even if they aren't immediately friendly for Mr Average Joe, simply to create and maintain a foundation for the future. I believe this is part of the strategy of the Free Software Foundation, which recognizes explicitly that free software often will lack some attractive qualities of proprietary software.
While I agree with your assessment, there is an engineering advantage to the cloud: you don't have to deal with as many different system configurations, some of which result in a broken application and an angry customer. The functional package manager approach (like Guix) seems to solve this problem.
It's an interesting question. Of course there are advantages to having these huge proprietary data volume, so I'm thinking along the lines of, how can we make useful software with the benefits we want, without relying on this kind of proprietary collection? Maybe there are alternate paths that even have their own technical or social or aesthetic benefits? Well, it's a question for the next decades, I think...
> In the near future, it will all be about having large amounts of data, and processing power;
Deep Learning doesn't actually require "Big Data". They went from thousands of examples to millions or billions, but we can scrape that kind of data with open source tools, record with cheap cameras, sensors, etc.
Also, there is a lot of research into scaling big models to small hardware. We can run pretty decent AI on cell phones and small systems.
Third, the AI academic research community is pretty open and posts everything, often including code and datasets. This enables rapid progress, but essentially, it brings knowledge in the public domain. We need that to continue in order to have access to the best algorithms.
It will be much easier than you think to have open source implementations of the best AI tools.
Its a valid point but the world can adapt. One off-the-cuff example, perhaps FOIA will move to a real-time request enviroment where I can offer permission to use my data to small company A and large companies A, B & C have to give direct access to their database about me via API so the information gap is leveled. If Small company A can get enough sign-ups they have access to large amounts of information.
>But do you think that free software can keep up against these giants?
On an algorithmic front, definitely. The key areas where free software is kneecapped against large corporate interests are in marketing, which free software has never been good at, and in training set gathering.
In the case of the latter, google, facebook and microsoft have a major advantage in gathering data to do things like improve accent recognition, because they don't give a shit about collecting everything you say via services like cortana to improve their voice recognition, as long as it's legal. That technique applies to a whole suite of other problems as well, unfortunately.
Don't forget UI and UX, in general. The free software pipeline has traditionally been wacky in this front, and is something that matters a lot to users.
I think the whole UX thing is overrated. People will like what they are accustomed to, and dislike what they are not accustomed to. Just look at all the flak Facebook gets when they move things around.
Or look at medical secretaries and their opinions about the new "user friendly" interfaces that replaced the keyboard driven programs of previous generations.
Supposedly there are doctors in Norway still holding on to their DOS based patient journal software. Arguably because they can operate it without taking the focus way from the conversation with the patient.
Another way out is to divorce free "as in beer" from free "as in freedom" and start charging for freedom-enhancing software. Find an economic model that works.
AFAIK it's fairly difficult to combine many machine learning models (although boosting is a thing). I'm a noob though.
We could do live online or batch training of models in a distributed manner if it is feasible. It would take more time to build new models because we would have to produce more data, but it's an idea.
For my personal use, free software has always been high enough quality; its at least 90% of the way there if not better. And I can trust it.
> And today, I basically see the tech giants as colossal enemies.
I think it's important to note that in-house voice recognition is simply the Nth iteration of a general trend away from privacy that has been going on for many many years.
Eg: Our emails are scraped, and use to target ads. I see ads for specific things that I've only mentioned as a 'reminder email' from myself, to myself. SMS can be read as well, at least on Android if the user allows it. And even if you are very careful to avoid this (using iMessage, hosting your own email, etc), the people you interact with may be sharing this info. People upload their contacts to random services, and if you avoid doing that yourself, your friends may not. These are just trivial examples in the wild now which don't include state-level surveillance (legally mandated ISP web history tracking, license plate tracking, etc).
I'm happy that having a microphone always listening in your home is bringing so many people around to this idea that maybe having companies know so much about you isn't an OK thing. But another part of me feels that short of strong privacy laws, the privacy ship sailed a long time ago.
Laws are usually written as a reaction to excess. But excess is measured as a distance between two points, and both are able to move: actions can be more extreme, and our judgements can be more or less harsh.
I think things could change quite dramatically if there was a moral panic around it. A few more scandals - something personal that the voting public can really relate to, rather than something vague and distant and somewhat comforting to some people, like mass surveillance.
The private data should not be centralized in realms of Google, Apple, Microsoft, instead it should be federated. This is why in 2014 I issued the Private Internet of Things Manifesto (https://github.com/niutech/priot).
I think we need to go even further - we need to reduce the cloud back to being dumb piece of infrastructure, compute for hire, paid by the hour. The only thing it should do is abstract away computation - not centralize data and processing under control of some companies (big or small, startups are actually the most annoying entities in the cloud ecosystem, IMO).
So for instance, I want my calendar or e-mail to be stored somewhere, I don't care where - hence in the cloud. But I want the data to be under my control. I can pay for a reasonable guarantee that the data will not suddenly disappear. I can pay for someone else's piece of code to be run against my data, but otherwise I want that someone else to stay away. Companies can earn money by providing useful pieces of code, and even managing stuff for people who absolutely don't care about how this stuff works - but we do need to reverse the idea. It should be arbitrary code run on demand against our data, not our data feeding someone's machine.
Classic web hosting still seems to do this job. In many cases, your data isn't insanely secure, unless you do the work to ensure it is yourself. But it's unlikely to be mined on a large, automated scale.
The email we've all been using is not all open-source and end-to-end encrypted, though there are open-source clients, some of which support end-to-end encryption.
Yes, and the end clients many people have been using don't support end-to-end encryption. So, we haven't all been using a e2e encrypted system already. We've been using a system over which e2e can be layered, and very few have been layering that over it. And many using it in a way where even with an e2e protocol, it wouldn't be secure, since they are using an third-party, remotely provided client that can be changed without their notice (webmail).
Well um, if you have an open protocol then instead of a monoculture you have many different clients, and you can't expectto CONTROL all of them and what they do. That's the whole point you are making in the first place. The irony is if you have true freedom and openness on all levels then you also can't control the tools that don't maximize their users' freedom/security/whatever so users of those tools are still locked in.
But YOU can choose to use what you want. And IT can choose to require certain things of those it communicates with. And now you're right back to less freedom in the name of more freedom, hehe.
> Now, looking at a device like this, I automatically compare it to something like a tractor or plow. It demands constant connectivity to Google HQ... it's full of secret code... it requires, for its basic paradigm, a private company's acquisition of staggering amounts of surveillance... and so on.
As someone who used to write code for snowplows, they're also becoming quite centralized. Location, plow settings, salt per mile/km usage and other values are tracked in real time from the municipal office. Municipalities are increasingly strapped for cash, so performing real-time data analysis on their services can save them quite a bit of money in the long run.
How accurate is the voice recognition? Even when restricted to a few command phrases, I struggle to see how this can be overly accurate when running on a Raspberry Pi. I've played with voice recognition in the past, and anything less than 98% accuracy is super frustrating after a week of usage. Siri is the most accurate voice recognition software I've used so far, and even Siri regularly fails to understand some words.
It depends on the tts plugin you use.
We have build and tested several tts plugins.
I can recommend Microsoft Bing Voice and the new Google Speech API. Both are very rarely wrong.
i'd love to see some work done in oss router firmware like tomato / dd-wrt to enable simple home automation tasks. not everyone needs a cloud assistant or has the chops to hack a web server onto their router.
I'm amazed that people still feel this level of paranoia about stuff, when they have a clear option: do not use the product. Concerned about the privacy implication of Google Home? Don't get one. Don't like the fact that Apple Watch reads biometric data? Get a Casio watch. Don't like the fact that Facebook knows who your friends are? Go out more.
The very fact that someone is watching the keynote and going "oh my Gawd, the level of intrusion" at every turn, kind of tells me they are interested in having the features but don't want to provide the data. Otherwise you wouldn't even be watching the keynote. Am I missing something?
(Full disclaimer: I do work for an Alphabet company, so take my words with as many grains of salt as you want.)
>I'm amazed that people still feel this level of paranoia about stuff, when they have a clear option: do not use the product.
Maybe because people are not islands, and don't think like isolated solipsists but also worry about the wider social implications of a technology?
Them not using a troublesome product won't solve that -- and it might not even solve the implications for them (e.g. like your friends can still tag you on photos on Facebook, even if you don't have an account there). Or you know, visiting a friend's house who has the device.
>The very fact that someone is watching the keynote and going "oh my Gawd, the level of intrusion" at every turn, kind of tells me they are interested in having the features but don't want to provide the data. Otherwise you wouldn't even be watching the keynote. Am I missing something?
Yes. 30+ years of data abuses and privacy encroachment by advertisers.
It's not a paid service with siloed data used only for the service's purpose -- rather the service is the lure to gather even more data for targeted marketing/ads.
> I'm amazed that people still feel this level of paranoia about stuff, when they have a clear option: do not use the product
People say that about stuff like Googlemail and Facebook. "Don't use it", except that doesn't always help when friends use it, and feed it with info about you as well. But hey, your fault for liking people who use Facebook or something. Now you can simply choose to not be friends with people who put this "home product" in their home, right? Or you can wear a disguise and talk with a false voice when visiting them, or ask them to turn it off whenever you're over. It's all voluntary, so no biggie.
At what point will all these small things combine into one big "You don't have to read or write anything, or communicate with any other person, or buy anything, or ever leave your house"? That's not even a slippery slope in my mind, more like taking 15 points which are in a straight line and extrapolating the line further. So when you talk of "this level of paranoia", I'd say the flipside of that is considering your stance a certain "level of apathy and/or short-sightedness".
Google Home crosses yet another line. It installs an always on far field microphone connected to Google in a house near me. Not getting one is no longer sufficient to keep my spoken words outside of Google's reach.
This is the same as "if you don't want to be tracked by Google online, don't use Google Search", which conveniently omits that Google is working hard to add a tracking beacon on every page on the internet, via AdSense and +1 button.
StreetView, being tagged in photos by friends even if I don't use Google Photos. I also have a number of reasons to believe Google is homing in most people location information from Android phones without their informed and explicit consent.
Google's privacy practices are very questionable. Google could do better than hide under "don't use Google". What ever happened to "Don't be evil?".
Maybe I'm parsing your tone wrong, but what is so outlandish/surprising about people liking features but not the implications of them? (or often, of the way they are implemented, see every cloud vs local software discussion ever)
E.g. cheald's comment above is pretty clear "I always wanted that, but I fear its implementation"
I think you parsed it correctly. My surprise is more about people watching a keynote fully knowing that most of the stuff announced will be ran by Google, and still being outraged about "the privacy implications." I'm not sure what they expected. A fully open source implementation with pre packaged Docker images so you can deploy your own cluster and petabytes of training data?
The truth about a lot of these services is they only work at the scale Google (or Amazon, or Facebook, etc.) run them. You'd spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars to get equivalent functionality, even if you got the software for free. I've basically had this argument every time someone helpfully suggests "Dropcam/Nestcam cameras should have an option to save data locally." You can have cheap, 100% private and efficient. Choose two.
No, you are buying a product whose description is literally "you ask it something, and our cloud service (which costs tons of money and was built over almost two decades) will give you the answer." How do you expect to do that without a roundtrip of a certain amount of information to Google's servers?
How is that "being evil"? Isn't that the product's whole raison d'être? Everything else ("it's going to be recording everything you say and reporting it to the NSA!") is just tinfoil-hat-level speculation and not based on any factual information. If I started saying "In-n-Out could change their burger recipe to include cyanide at any minute and kill all their customers" would you accuse In-n-Out of plotting to kill everyone?
For the record, this is my very own (pretty frustrated) point of view, and obviously doesn't represent Alphabet's view in any capacity.
You are indeed missing something important. We can choose not to use a particular product. But we cannot choose not to use all the products everyone else is using, because that would make us lonely, antisocial hermits without the slightest chance of ever finding work, friends or lovers.
So even if Googlers may find it "amazing" that privacy advocates don't just shut up and go live behind a rock, that's what you're going to have to live with in a free society.
> We can choose not to use a particular product. But we cannot choose not to use all the products everyone else is using, because that would make us lonely, antisocial hermits without the slightest chance of ever finding work, friends or lovers.
I don't use Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. etc. etc., you name it. Yet, somehow I am employed, have friends and hobbies, and am happily married. How could that have possibly happened?
I don't use Facebook and WhatsApp either, and Twitter doesn't have my real name, so I know that it is possible to avoid many intrusive services, but it depends on what communities you are part of and what sort of people you want to stay in touch with.
I guess the proof is all in the etc etc etc.
How about things like using Google search, exchanging unencrypted email with people who use ad funded mail services like gmail, using software or hardware that isn't completely open source (or working with people who do), using ad funded web sites, operating systems or apps that track you, using credit cards and other authenticated payment services, using location based services, using the internet without Tor, making unencrypted phone calls?
But yes, strictly speaking you are right. It is not impossible to avoid all of that and still have a social life. It's just very very difficult, and that's why it makes sense to speak up when useful services are designed in ways that create unnecessary privacy issues.
I guess you have a point. I, too, grew up before all these things were "the standard" (heck, I didn't have internet at home until I was 22 for crying out loud) so even though it is annoying when they aren't there, I can totally picture a life without them.
Not "googlers", this particular "googler" (me.) Google is a huge company, and I imagine a lot of people actually hold views closer to yours.
I'm just an old codger that can't understand why people have expectations of A, B and C, when they are buying a product that says it does A, promises to do B as well as possible and tells you that it definitely can't do C because it's technically impossible. Like, back in my day people read EULAs and stuff :)
Except soon one's environment will be enveloped by a cloud of such devices, each monitoring, tracking, and associating without consent.
And, please don't think this is hyperbole. Independently, over the past year, I've caught parts of this same vision from two separate (large) companies. This is the low hanging fruit. The rewards are too high, the costs are low, and there are very few downside (to the companies).
This has always been the case across centuries. Information is power and grabbing or keeping it is a generational challenge.
So, you can't just put your arms down and say it is hopeless.
The Free Software Foundation fight was also hopeless when they started, look at what happened since that time and behold how software with available code dominates the market for third-party components.
It is in our hands the responsibility to act and make the new technology to respect privacy and people as much as possible.
I remember having a similar feeling of wonder watching the amazing movie "Her."
I then went down a thought path of what level of personal data the AI would have had in the movie, and started thinking about what that would look like from a monetization/privacy standpoint given todays realities of advertising, NSA surveillance, etc. Pretty scary.
In fact, I'd love for someone to do a cut of clips from that movie with overlays detailing all the bits of personal data that would have been fed to a company's servers based on what is happening in the scene--there are some particularly juicy scenes for that if I recall correctly.
I do. And I recognize the hypocrisy of that. I think the difference for me is that my phone isn't a permanent fixture in my house - it's not explicitly a surveillance device. Echo/Home are explicitly audio surveillance devices, though ostensibly benevolent in their design. I can stick my phone in a Faraday bag easily enough if I want to.
I guess what it comes down to is that while I recognize that I sacrifice a measure of potential for privacy with my phone, I judge the benefits to be worth it. I can't say the same for Echo/Home, and it somehow feels qualitatively different in that phones aren't designed to be always-on microphones constantly processing audio to send it off to a server somewhere else for analysis.
To be honest, I trust that Google and Amazon are probably acting in my best interests with these products, for the most part. I don't think it's all an evil conspiracy to get microphones and cameras into my inner sanctum or anything. I believe it's very possible for a product like this to be mutually beneficial for provider and consumer. And hey, if a state actor wants to surveil me, it's going to happen regardless of these devices being in my house. But as we've learned just how fragile security is, it seems foolish to me to rush off to install black-box monitoring devices all over and just hope that they do what we think they are doing. I love the idea of these things, but they are such potentially powerful windows into our lives that I think that we have to be really sure the value they provide is worth the security risk they entail.
Its not that I don't think that Google and Amazon are probably acting in my best interests now. They probably are. Also not that I think that the government couldn't spy on me if they wanted to. They could.
The scenario that worries me is that years from now, Google and Amazon may be coerced into turning over what I said yesterday to a corrupt government fishing through the past for word-crime. And boy-howdy, it turns out they recorded everything and retained it forever. Surprise!
>The scenario that worries me is that years from now, Google and Amazon may be coerced into turning over what I said yesterday
Amazon has said that they're only recording what happens after the hotword is triggered. That's why they can't do custom hotwords - listening for "hey alexa" is built right into the hardware and it doesn't do anything until it hears that. Unless they're flat-out lying, they can't provide any information about what you said yesterday to anybody because they don't have that data.
My 2012 Moto X has a trained keyword (and in fact a dedicated low-power specialized processor to listen for it - one of the things I like about that phone). No "OK Google" for me; it's "Listen please", in Russian. Never tripped by mistake.
> I think the difference for me is that my phone isn't a permanent fixture in my house - it's not explicitly a surveillance device.
For most people, its a permanent fixture on their person: people these days leave their home more than they leave their phone.
> Echo/Home are explicitly audio surveillance devices, though ostensibly benevolent in their design.
Echo/Home are no more explicitly audio surveillance devices than cell phones are.
> I can't say the same for Echo/Home, and it somehow feels qualitatively different in that phones aren't designed to be always-on microphones constantly processing audio to send it off to a server somewhere else for analysis.
Modern phones (considering the hardware and software stack together) are, in fact, designed to do just that, both Siri and Google Now voice recognition works (though it is, IIRC, disabled-by-default in the latter case) from the lock screen. Its just as always-on as Echo/Home.
One key difference is power consumption, and to a lesser extent, data consumption. It is not practical for your mobile phone to continually spy on everything you say, due to battery issues; however, it can listen for a keyword to wake up to, and then do the more high-powered voice recognition. So the scope is limited, or you will just have a dead phone in your pocket (which, of course, will also not be listening to you).
With something like Echo / Home, the always-on power source makes it technologically feasible for it to always be listening to you as well, without needing to wake up to a keyword. Now, they may as a feature only start processing based on a keyword, but you don't have the "comfort" of knowing that it is technological limitation rather than a software decision that may or may not be in your control.
Cell phones aren't allowed into classified environments in US government buildings because they can be remotely turned into listening devices without the owner's knowledge. There's been guidance on this for a long time. The cell phone in your pocket is definitely a surveillance device.
Let's be real. You don't keep your phone in a Faraday bag and you probably never will.
Unless the device is programmed to automatically enter into that mode in the absence of any signal on the assumption that if it is in a shielded location it is likely interesting.
Nope, I dont. And I agree with @cheald. It's a big shift to have a "press to query" as opposed to a vague keyword-based "always available".
I know some technophiles coworkers who have an Echo, and I couldn't for the life of me trust Amazon, Google (or even Apple) with potentially the always-on stream of audio from my house.
I really wish these various voice offerings would offer push-to-talk as an option. It would solve a whole bunch of problems: It would activate reliably when you want and almost never accidentally, you don't need to use awkward code phrases, and it can trigger results as soon as you release the button instead of having to wait for silence. It would also allow for better privacy by making a phone in which the microphone is hardware controlled by the button.
It just seems so obvious to me that I don't know why no one has done it. I guess needing a new button makes it harder to sell, but this seems like a great use case for smartwatches.
Honest people do not go offline, only people with something to hide do. Honest people have all microphones accessible and all cameras untaped. I am afraid you have been flagged by NSA because of your suspicious behavior pattern.
Frequently, yes. Though not 3GL/4GL mobile networks.
I'm aware of the risk and hypocrisy. I'm also far from happy with it (I increasingly dislike Android, Samsung, and with varying levels, Google).
But given the balance of something I can power down, that isn't always on me, and the portability and cost benefits over an alternative laptop, its a far-less-than-perfect satisficing solution for now.
I'm thinking my nexus will be my last Android device, not decided yet what I want to replace it with but dumb phone is looking likely, I'm either at home, the office or somewhere I can use my laptop so don't really have the need for a tablet, I might been able to google the odd thing now and again when out and about but that's a once or twice a week thing for me.
I've come to resent carrying a phone all the time, I rarely answer it and resent that "I tried ringing but you didn't answer!" whine you get as though it's beyond incredulous that you would ever not answer the phone.
What I like about the tablet is the size, the battery life, the switching between landscape (generally: composing w/ keyboard) and portrait (generally: reading long-form content) modes. A 10" form factor plus bluetooth keyboard is sufficient for some Real Work (though that's hugely crippled by system and software limitations).
As a comms device, on a sufficiently fast WiFi/broadband connection, it's also useful. I've not done that often, but it's been done, and I was impressed.
The OS is a mess in many particulars.
It handles external storage poorly. It doesn't multi-taske well. Multi-window mode is specific to application. The default shell userland is unforgiveably anemic (Termux, one of a few available add-ons is much better). Lack of comprehensive privacy controls, or insight, is a huge issue.
The app "ecosystem" is pathologically broken. I've written on this at G+, my feeling is it needs to be scrapped.
Samsung's own tweaks are also pretty bad. The fact that the device is entirely locked down from a bootloader perspective (it was a bit of a panic on-the-road buy) has become beyond annoying. Inability to remove certain stock apps is a major concern.
Google's "Play" store is beyond annoying.
I'm watching for news of Firefox OS and Ubuntu's mobile offerings. I'm not particularly hopeful. A small laptop _might_ be a suitable replacement, if I can park Linux on it (without systemd).
Mostly it's a very effective advertisement against itself.
And more generally: the tech world very, very, very badly needs to find a non-advertising business model.
No, I haven't, though that looks interesting. Quick thoughts:
16 GB storage is far, far, far too little. That should be upgradeable. The problem with microSD expansion is vfat. That's crippled on both capacity and permissions. I'd also prefer encryptable removeable media.
Speakers. I want my devices to NOT have them. I'll attach via Bluetooth or a wired headset/mic combo. I'd also prefer cameras be shuttered. That's both for protection (lenses get scratched) and privacy.
Other than that, yes, it's headed the way I'd like things to go.
The external storage thing is an accident of history, with perhaps some MAFIAA meddling.
When the first Android device shipped, all internal storage was dedicated to OS and apps. But OEMs wanted to advertise that they had X gigs onboard. And thus they started partitioning internal storage, and mounting one part as if it was removable memory.
Problem is that apps could not go on removable memory, so people bought a device only to find that a few apps was enough to max out that side of the partition.
And thus Google came up with "move to SD".
But then that got into trouble with USB data transfers, as the "SD" had to be unmounted on the Android side before it could be mounted by the PC over the cable.
So somewhere around 3.x Google adopted MTP, and union mounts to emulate a FAT partitioned SD (for legacy reasons).
But at the same time they introduced new access permissions, but reserved write permission to actual removable storage for system level apps. Thus you could use your PC to transfer music and such onto a SD, but you could not officially do so from within Android. Various OEMs, Samsung for example, modified the permissions file so that their devices retained the old behavior.
Since then Google has in fits and starts modified the MTP support so that it can also be used by internal apps to write to removable storage without having to deal with permissions. At the same time they have tried to lock down access to the "SD" even further as various dumb app devs have used it to store sensitive user data for any other app to see.
Thing is that going via the MTP subsystem invites DRM, as the apps talk to a database that then talk to the FS. And that database can be incomplete, or the subsystem can outright lie to the apps. And it so happens that Google adopted MTP along the same time as they introduced Play Music and Play Movies.
Then again, the consumer UI/UX designers have long been tilting the windmills over the whole files and folders thing. For some reason they see it as a failure of UX, and thus something that needs to be at least hidden from the user, if not outright abolished. See numerous attempts at replacing files and folders with a grand database of metadata, that will "magically" pull out everything you have stored related to that company project or aunt Tillie as needed.
I don't know about Android (though I assume it works the same way), but iPhone's "Hey Siri" is done entirely on-device, so until you activate Siri, nothing you say is sent to a server.
It makes literally no sense for the Hey Siri functionality to do that. This is just a very slightly altered version of "it's an internet-enabled device with a microphone, it could be hacked and told to turn on its microphone remotely", which is a legitimate, if fairly paranoid, complaint that applies to all such devices, even fully open-source and open-hardware ones.
You can at least audit the network traffic. And since people have been able to hook their own software into Siri, you probably somehow can break open its encryption and look at the content. (Unless I misremember how that worked)
Until I can set the endpoint this thing talks to[1], It ain't living on my LAN.[2]
[1] This, of course, implies an open source server I can host as well.
[2] Maybe it is just me, but I choose to leave my phone at home fairly often. It is a bit of a luxury for me, and I find I enjoy the feeling when I'm not contactable. Things like this are closer to furniture, and don't take an affirmative "opt-in" (like taking your phone with you) to be functional in their role. So when my brother's kids come over, I'm opting them in. When a visitor is wondering around half-awake looking for the coffee, I'm opting them in.
I realize some others seem to feel that this is identical to cell phone surveillance (but if so, and if you always have your phone, why bother with this?). I don't, and I'm not alone. The law recognizes major distinctions between 'home' and 'not-home'; I mention this only as a demonstration that the distinction is a clearly rooted one for a lot of people.
Never EVER under any circumstances would I put a closed-source cloud-connected always-on microphone in my house.
Google's entire business model and value as a company revolves around their ability to maximize the accuracy of their consumer profiles. They have no incentive to do anything other than maximally invade privacy. A device like this from them is even creepier than the Amazon Echo. While it's not released yet, I don't see a disable microphone switch on it either. At least the Echo has that-- though I imagine most users would forget to use it.
The defenders will say "but it only listens when it hears the keyword!" What assurance do I have of this? How secure is this device? Is the keyword recognition performed locally or remotely? What is the definition of "listen?" I'm guessing that like glass the privacy policy will allow them to collect everything.
To the advantage of society, Google's value also lies in not alienating people to the point that they shun its products and services.
Google cannot sell advertising based on my eyeballs if I won't use Google Search, block ads, avoid Google Maps, and download video via yt-download vs. watching it on the far-less-convenient YouTube website or application.
Google have lost me to search, and several other products, for precisely this reason. I don't know the segment of the population I represent, but it is a segment.
A US Department of Commerce survey release this past week reveals that 20% of the population consciously avoids online activities already due to privacy and surveillance concerns. This isn't fully attributable to concerns over Google (and that almost certainly poses a subset of those dissuaded), but it is a surprisingly large effect of privacy concerns.
The trust factor you mention is a huge one. Cognizability is a wonderful word I've run across recently (from William Stanley Jevons' discussion of money). It refers to the ability to instantly and unambiguously recognise a characteristic or trait. Electronic devices lack cognizability of privacy.
I've switched to DuckDuckGo and "paused" various activities within my Google account settings. Still, I can't help wondering if records I've deleted there are simply my copies and they have their own backups stashed somewhere.
20% -- I hope it's that high. That's a high enough number to get peoples' attention and challenge the prevailing meme of "nobody cares about privacy or security."
(Privacy IS security. There's not really a distinction.)
"Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday.
This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities."
Those of us with Google smartwatches have had this functionality for some time. Its very convenient to just whispers, "OK Google remind me at 3pm tomorrow about the dog's vet appointment." Or "What's the weather in Reykjavik?" Having this functionality on your phone, tablet, or computer is very different than having it right in front of you at all times. Its hard to quantify, but there's an inconvenience of pulling out a phone or a tablet and even then muscle memory dictates that you'll probably just start typing and swiping instead of speaking.
Having this all tie in with various smarthome appliances will be interesting as well. Sure, I can open my garage door by using an app on my phone but I'd rather just say, "Open the garage door." I think ultimately we prefer to do things like we're dealing with other people, not machines. Amazon's Alexa was a good first step towards this. I'm glad Google is chasing Amazon as Google has become a Microsoftian organization that only does well when they're chasing a competitor or having one right on their heels.
If I was a shady business, a nefarious government, or a malicious hacker and I wanted to eavesdrop on you, I would probably attack the vector that spends much more time by your side and can easily hide its data connections from you, e.g. your mobile phone. As long as these home automation devices ride on your own personal network, it is easy to monitor to what extent they are sending data back home.
My argument is that you should prioritize your worries and these devices are a lesser threats than phones. To use your analogies, I wouldn't worry about tightening my seatbelt or getting cancer if I am in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital for some other life threatening issue.
Or perhaps a better analogy, I wouldn't stress about keeping the windows of my home locked if I never locked my front door.
That's a step in the right direction, but I won't be adopting any similar tech until it can be self hosted (and preferably live on a non-routable vlan, maybe with proxy access to white-listed websites)
Whenever I see one of these things, and the people who happily purchase it without giving even two seconds of thought to the privacy implications, it makes me realize how important organizations like the FSF and EFF are.
When I was younger, I wanted the same thing. To be kind of like Tony Stark in Iron Man, with all the convenience and power that future technology seems to promise.
But now that I'm old and boring, I'm perfectly happy with my non-futuristic life. We still have an iPhone 3G which we use as an iPod around the house (which we plug into our speakers the old fashioned way, by plugging one end of a headset cord into the iPhone and the other into the speaker's AUX jack), and we have our laptop computer which we use for facebook and reddit.
And that's the most "futuristic" technology I care to have. I don't plan to buy a VR headset. I take notes with a pen and paper when I'm not at my computer. We still write our grocery lists down that way and mark them off in the store with a pen.
It may be boring and un-futuristic, but it gets the job done just fine, and I really don't have any complaints. I'm probably in a tiny minority on HN though.
I have a similar view but for different reasons (though I do own an S7 - but for different reasons[0]).
I still want to be like Tony Stark, or captain Picard. I want the cool future stuff. But I came to two realizations - a) it's always cooler in the movies than in real life, but b) even taking that into account, our future sucks compared to theirs. In the movies I like, technology was about empowering people. They were tools. Today, more and more the products are nice looking but barely functional, and sport the minimum subset of features that can be sold to the lowest common denominator.
So take Google Now. Does it recognize voice? Yes, quite well I'd say. Would it be a problem for Google to let you hook up your own actions and data sources to the system, so that you could make yourself a Star Trek environment with a spare tablet attached to a wall? No, it wouldn't. It's an obvious feature. A feature which they - and pretty much everyone else - refuses to provide. Why? Because fuck useful. Lowest common denominator doesn't need that.
[0] - I'm tired of buying shitty hardware. When I change the phone, I prefer to shell out for a top-of-the-line model to be 100% sure it will work fast and stay ahead of the bloat. I learned it the hard way with my first smartphone, which was barely powerful enough to lift its own OS - and trying to connect it to Internet always ended up with having to pull out the battery. I was stuck with it for a couple of years. A smartphone is something I use quite a lot every day, and even little frustrations accumulate.
Not so much as you might think, I'm pretty much the same as are most of the programmers I know my age IRL, been programming since I was 7 so nearly 30 years, have no intention of buying VR unless it's useful for work, I'm past the point of buying tech because it's new, I want genuinely useful and less hassle than the alternative.
I'm not comfortable with this either, but I recognize it's hypocritical-- after all, smartphones have microphones AND camera and are internet-connected running proprietary software.
There's nothing hypocritical about not wanting FURTHER intrusion...
Not to mention, smartphones don't record all you say 24/7 and send it to a foreign data center, except if tampered with. These devices do as their normal operation mode.
Not to be blindingly trustworthy or anything, but I'm pretty sure none of these devices currently state that they send everything you say 24/7 (or more specifically, the Echo). That would, again, only be if it had been tampered with.
The way I see it, the difference is the burden in not having the device. For a lot of people a smart-phone isn't necessary, but it's extremely inconvenient to go without. Whereas these devices are new, so they aren't ingrained into our culture yet.
I agree with you and OP. If there was a good open-source version of either of these, I'd buy them in a heartbeat, but there's not.
Kirk wouldn't have gotten away with half the shit he did if every word he said to the computer roundtripped to the Federation and back before being processed.
Fortunately for him, the society of the Federation isn't driven by greed and personal profit seeking anymore, so they can focus on doing things the right way - like making the starship computer process voice recognition instead of sending it God knows where via subspace.
> Now, I just see an internet-connected microphone in a software black box
A little while back, there was a kickstarter for "The Ubi"... basically as you describe.
A non-mobile v0.1 Ziggy [Quantum Leap] where you'd plug it in and ask it generic questions. "Ubi, what's the weather?" and the like. IIRC, the Ubi is slowly but decently chugging along.
I was getting prepared to argue with you, but then I thought about it and realized you were right. I'm not prepared to give Google that much control over my house, especially when it's completely cloud-based.
However, I am totally willing to use cloud-based voice recognition software, because the machine learning clusters required don't fit in my house. Sure, you can run basic voice recognition software on a server or a laptop. But that only gets you maybe 80% accuracy if you're lucky. There is a huge difference between 80% and 98% accuracy, it's the difference between using something every day, and turning it off after a week of frustration. (I've been there myself, I tried building my own voice recognition system for home automation.)
But I think that's really the only packet that needs to leave my home network. I hate that my Philips Hue bulbs need an internet connection to work.
Let us be reminded that the FBI can neither confirm nor deny that they've accessed the microphones on the Amazon Echo of suspects, according to FOIA requests.
Adoption of this tech will hurt general privacy. Find me a home where there isn't an internet enabled microphone or camera. Even if you are security conscious, are your family, friends, coworkers and the people you are near?
Does everything else in your house run open source firmware?
How does source being available tell you whether your device is secure? Are you auditing it, then building and installing the firmware yourself so you know that the binary matches the released source? Are you doing the same with the bootloader?
> When I was younger, I dreamed of something like this. Voice control for my home!
You're making it sound like it doesn't already exist. This is a me-too product from Google as a response to Amazon's Echo which already does home automation, voice commands etc.
Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...
I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device.
I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs.
I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them.
I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command.
I want to be able to control my Harmony remote, and all of the devices connected to my Harmony hub.
I want to be able to access my Google calendar.
I want to be able to make hands-free phone calls to anyone on my Google contacts.
If my grandmother falls, I want her to be able to call 911 by talking to the Google Home device.
I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha questions by voice.
I want to be able to have a back-and-forth conversation to arrive at a conclusion. I don't want to have to say a perfectly formulated command like, "Add an event to my calendar on Jan 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm titled go to the pool party". I want to be able to say, "Can you add an event to my calendar?", and then answer a series of questions. I hate having to formulate complex commands as a single sentence.
I want to be able to have a Google Home device in each room, without having to give each one its own wake-up word. Just have the closest one to me respond to my voice (based on how well it can hear me).
I want to be able to play music on all of my Google Home devices at the same time, and have the music perfectly synchronized.
This is my wish list. I am currently able to do more than half of these items with Amazon Echo, but I had to do a bunch of hacking and it was a pain in the ass.
If Google Home can deliver on these points, I would switch from Amazon Echo in a heartbeat.
According to Ars Technica, Google Home is actually gonna be more locked down than Amazon Echo.
> Initially, Google says that it will not be creating APIs for Assistant and Home and that as such, any integrations with services and other devices will have to come from Google first. This approach is a contrast with the Echo, which is designed to be extensible.
Initially doing internal integrations, then releasing API access to trusted partners, then making APIs publicly available is how Google has done lots of things. So, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the route Google does with this.
Yeah, I suspect the idea is that "public APIs are forever," especially in hardware. They probably want to be able to collect some real user data, make a few mistakes and get a better idea of what role the product is actually going to fulfill before committing to something that they'll have to maintain indefinitely.
The key word there is initially. Echo didn't have an SDK when it was first released either neither did Google Now for a while. That's Google's MO for new services and APIs, limited initial release to iron out the bugs and not flood with low effort apps/services.
How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn't seem to be a thing that's even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it.
You could build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it'll suck.
Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said "computer, volume, three quarters" from any place in the room, and the loud music turned down a notch. Etc. That was ten years ago, with a crappy electret microphone I soldered to a cable myself and sticked to my wardrobe with a bit of insulating tape.
I'm not buying you couldn't make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system. Sure, it may not be as good as Echo or Google Now (though the latter does suck hardly at times, it's nowhere near reliable to use, and it doesn't understand shit over a quite good and expensive Bluetooth headset). But it would be hackable, customizable. You could make it do some actual work for you.
Oh, and it wouldn't lag so terribly as Google Now does. Realtime applications and data over mobile networks don't mix.
But we're getting close to the point where you can do some of this. For example - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03185.pdf - LSTM speech recognition running on a Nexus 5.
The more serious problem with this is that it's going to be expensive -- and somewhat wasteful. There's a lot of pressure to keep consumer devices as cheap as possible, and the cloud is an awesome way to do that. Having shared cloud-based infrastructure for the speech recognition as opposed to putting it into every device (even though it's only used for ~5 minutes every day) is probably a lot cheaper. Consider the hardware in an Amazon Echo:
vs. a Nexus 5 (2GB DRAM, 4 core 2.2Ghz Krait 400) -- the N5 has roughly 8x the DRAM and compute of the CPU in the Echo.
Would you pay an extra $150 for a LocalEcho that still had to send most of your queries to a search engine for resolution, or to a cloud music service for music? (You & I might, but most consumers wouldn't.)
> I'm not buying you couldn't make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system.
I agree. It's not a problem of technology, it's a problem of incentive. There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system, unfortunately.
> There's no money in developing self-contained, off-line speech recognition system
Nonsense. Self-hosting is highly valued in the enterprise sector. But we're not talking about the sort of products that could be sold to consumers for a few hundred dollars here.
A desktop PC is more than able to do good speech recognition as long as it's able to train the model for individual voices. Getting good results without training the model for the user beforehand is harder, and you would probably never be quite as good as a cloud-based system.
A Pi, though, couldn't do well at all, just like you said. If I wanted to build a system like this for myself, I would target an HTPC form factor.
edit: Another possibility, which was explored elsewhere in this thread, would be to keep the listening device "thin", but have the ability to offload the processing to a machine in my LAN instead of one the "cloud".
Hey, people with experience in speech recognition, please chime in!
Just the other day I was looking at CMU's Sphinx project for speech recognition. It seems quite capable, even of building something like this Google thing, but I haven't tried to actually use it.
Large-vocabulary recognition probably needs something better than a Raspberry Pi... so, just use a more powerful CPU.
Yes, Google has an incomprehensibly enormous database of proprietary knowledge and information. Good for them! If we want to build a home assistant that doesn't depend on Google, we'll have to make tradeoffs. That doesn't mean it has to suck.
I have "Offline speech recognition" with Google Voice Typing that seems to work perfectly well in airplane mode. The downloaded language pack (English) is 39 MB.
Here is the problem, not all devices you could work with it are self-hosted and doesn't allow cloud interactions. Now if you're talking about Home's dependence on a cloud for local interaction, then I get you.
But, on the other side, if it's not open and you can't use any device with it... I'm going to be really upset on a personal level.
The reasons consumer IoT isn't huge yet are:
1) Disparate connection types (e.g., I could buy Z-wave, Wifi, BLE, etc and they all onboard differently)
2) I can't choose which device I want to use with which platform because of politics.
Some of these devices (thermostats or security systems for instance) aren't impulse buys. If I have a Honeywell thermostat, and Home doesn't support it, I either buy a new thermostat or don't buy Home.
I rather suspect that the knowledge graph it uses is a rather hefty dataset. Probably not suitable for a home installation. And how would you keep it up-to-date without the cloud? Would you have it scrape websites and consume feeds itself?
Knowledge graph could be a separate service. It handles only a subset of requests anyway; no reason for the request itself not to make a "pit stop" under my control before it is sent to fetch data. You could also use more than one provider of a knowledge graph in this case.
The more important aspect of it is fixing the problems with said knowledge graph. For instance, Google doesn't have the data on the public transportation in my city. I could easily write a scrapper that would fetch me the bus/tram timetables - but there's no way to integrate that source of data with Google Now. It's one example, but in practice Google's knowledge graph is pretty much useless for me. At best, it can answer me some trivia questions sometimes.
1. What's the name of that film that came out around the time of Jane's birthday party, the one with that guy in that I always confuse with Adam Sandler?
2. Where can I go for lunch and sit outside in the sunshine?
3. Play me some music that I'd like but nothing too recent.
Amazon's Echo doesn't have an owner concept. I didn't think Siri did either. My Echo can take commands from anyone, there's no authentication at all outside of initial set up with your Amazon account. My daughter and I have completely different voices and we use it without problems.
> Amazon's Echo doesn't have an owner concept. I didn't think Siri did either. My Echo can take commands from anyone, there's no authentication at all outside of initial set up with your Amazon account. My daughter and I have completely different voices and we use it without problems.
By owner I mean the voice that it's trained to respond to (not in an authentication sense). See [1] and [2].
About as much as you can buy Amazon Echo or Google Home actually. At least IBM makes very clear what the usage conditions of Watson are, and it's fully extensible.
Watson's basically a "bring-your-own-knowledge-base" NLP platform. There's the developer site[1] if you can manage to read through IBM's marketing speak[2]. The docs are pretty good.
2. It's rather amusing, but IBM has a ton of really smart people making cool stuff, then a ton of marketing people seemingly pitching at someone other than the target audience and making it sound dumb. If you can wade through the marketing BS, Watson is very cool.
When Windows10/Cortana was released my buddy attached a mixer/switch to his PC allowing him to wire input mics and sound speakers to every room in his house.
And though I can't see any personal uses for such a device, he swears it has changed his life, and the only thing I believe he does with it is tells Cortana to play Van Halan first thing when he wakes up.
I love the image of an old stasi officer seeing the current trend of people paying good money to effectively bug their own appartments. It must be surreal to them.
Stasi used people to bug on people as early as in high school - it was at least in my opinion much more nefarious than passive mass surveillance - at least it's different. I'm from the former GDR and they wreaked havoc over countless families over seemingly bullshit things. So it's difficult to compare IMHO.
But I guess it's not an impossible technical problem to train some machine learning algorithm to classify the voices and the conversation in the room and detect typical behavior patterns of a crime and be it smoking weed with friends.
>the only thing I believe he does with it is tells Cortana to play Van Halan first thing when he wakes up
This is pretty much my usage at the moment with the Google Assistant. I tried it this morning for the first time. I sleep with my tablet on the bed next to me (I have a very big bed and a very small room, so I use half of my bed as a makeshift shelf). I woke up and went "Ok Google, play me some music, please" and then I gently woke up with the sound of whatever I had in my library.
Then I went to take a shower and realized that voice commands are really super useful for that situation. I used them to change songs or tell Google to play me different songs.
The only annoying thing at the moment is that the microphone input seems to be calibrated to a much higher volume than conversational voice so I end up shouting "OK GOOGLE" multiple times to get it to register and I'm pretty sure my flatmates aren't thrilled at that idea.
Google, thanks for shutting down Freebase.com on 2 May 2016. By taking it offline, and using it (Knowledge Graph) for Google Home you effectively locked out all competitors. WikiData is a far cry and a fraction of the size of what was Freebase.
Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively.
How useful is an aging Freebase dump from last year? How useful is it next year? Old outdated data isn't that useful? There is no alternative to Freebase, and oth companies bought companies to have access to an alternative. Microsoft bought Powerset company for Bing, IBM bought Wekko company for Watson, Googe closed down Freebase to use it in-house. And everone else is very "happy" about Google.
Frankly, I have used freebase in one of the project and I then moved to Dbpedia because its content seemed better. I would like to understand how you are using it that Freebase seems the only alternative ?
What exactly do we want to automate at home? I think this whole home automation and smart home stuff is complete bullshit. Obviously there are some nice things, like "play me song xyz", but IMHO it is completely oversold. There are just not that much things to automate at home.
And this does not mean that I think 640K are enough memory for everyone.
Yeah, ok, I get that, it is nice. But I do not see some kind of revolution (I am sure I heard that term connected to home automation) that is often proclaimed.
For me the time saving is just too low compared with the alternative of wrestling with some kind of UI, but I may change my mind if I try it out for some time? Let's see.
//edit:
And I think turning lights on/off and playing songs is a really bad example. It is like the Fibonacci sequence of programming language PR. I really do not think one goes with a PL because it has a short solution to generate the Fibonacci sequence. It is nice. But not useful.
Yeah, bullshit was a hard term, I am sorry, but I just can not see how these things require a specific "home" device;
- grocery list:
So some kind of Todo list. But you can do that with your mobile computation device, or just take notes physically?
- order $thing:
I do not think that humans need more convenient buying-experiences than what is already there (think Amazon, food-delivery services, etc.). I guess most people want to _see_ what they pay for and look up specific apps?
- doctor schedules:
The scheduling problem. Maybe I am out of touch, but I would write an e-mail and/or call?
- dish washer cron:
Ok, I do not get that? Why would you want to schedule a dish washer job for a specific time?
- turn on the oven:
Yeah, but there is surely a UI for the oven, that has the functionality to turn on the oven (seems like a core feature). If it's really oldschool, it has a button that one may press (or a slider). That may seem inconvenient, so it may have a web-ui. However there is NO reason whatsoever why it should be connected to the "cloud".
You could use your phone or take notes on paper, but being able to make a note that i need more flour the second i reach for the bag in the back of the cabinet is significantly easier.
- order $thing
Again, you might not think so, but instead of just making a note that i need more flour, i'd love to be able to just ask for more flour and know it will be my "normal" brand and will be here in a day or 2.
- dish washer
Because it's loud, uses up hot water, and at least I often forget to start it until it's too late. I'd love to remember "oh shit i forgot to start the dishes" and just call out to have it go (or say to start at 1am when i'm asleep).
- turn on the oven
Again, in a perfect world i'd love this ability. I start on dinner and can just ask the oven to be at 425 in 15 minutes. Nobody is asking for it to be connected to the cloud specifically, but if it is and is secure i'd have no problems with it.
Most people put things in the dishwasher or in the oven and then turn it on right there and then. Wanting the ability to turn it on remotely after you've put the necessary things in it is an unusual edge case, and one most people wouldn't pay extra for.
Plus... An API to remotely turn on your oven is really dangerous if it isn't completely secure. I don't think I'd trust any IoT company to make one I'd have in my house.
Most of the time you have to pre-heat the oven before you start baking stuff. And for the dishwasher, a lot of energy-saving plans make electricity cheaper in the evening/night so plenty of people load the dishwasher during the day and then turn it on at night. This is what my family has been doing for decades and it's what I'd also do if I had a dishwasher at home.
A remote control dishwasher doesn't solve the "forgot to put it on" problem. It's still relying on forgetful humans. What you need is an autonomous dishwasher that puts itself on if it's full of dirty dishes and the electricity cost is low enough.
Solutions that solve the wrong problem are not solutions.
And solutions that don't understand the problem aren't solutions ;)
In the dishwasher case, sometimes i'm forgetting, others i just want it to go on at a specific time. Sure, I could fiddle with the current method of a button that adds +1 hour wait time when pressed (and doing math in my head to figure out when 1am is...), or it could have yet another clock i need to reset when the power goes out and i could schedule it via time, but those are clunky and have a poor interface.
I don't want my washer going on it's own, we often load it as much as possible before turning it on to avoid wasting electricity and water, that means it may sit there a few days 70% full waiting for a few more dishes before we start it. And if electricity is cheapest while i have guests over, I don't want it running then (as it's pretty loud and front-and-center in our house). Also dishwashers have a bunch of settings (most of them i believe useless, but they are there anyway). Being able to tell the dishwasher to turn on tonight when i realized that i forgot to start it right as i'm going to bed would be convenient.
It's not revolutionary or anything, just a small nice-to-have. Just like how having a connected thermostat has made it nicer to be able to adjust the temperature from the couch or bed, and how having "smart" light switches makes it nice to turn on the fan or turn off the porch light without having to get up. Nothing that will change the world, but each one is a small improvement in my life.
I recently got an Echo and the shopping list feature is great, even given I'm outside the US and can't use the ordering functionality.
It's very easy (don't have to get phone out or find paper) to say "Alexa, add Cornflakes to my shopping list" and then when I'm at the shop, have a live list to check off.
The timer function is simple but effective as well. "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes" when cooking pasta. I get so sick of getting my phone out and doing it that way.
These sound like tiny things, but they're so much more natural.
My three year old asks "Alexa, how tall is an elephant?" etc.
Yes, there is an Alexa app that presents the shopping and todo lists. Both with checkboxes. It also shows you a history of things you've said to it, how they were interpreted, and you can give it feedback. In addition, you use the app to set any audio accounts (Spotify, etc) that you want it to use when playing music.
I have several small apartments where it's open concept and the dishwasher is loud enough to drown out the TV when it's at a reasonable volume. So, after you wrap up dinner and throw everything in the dishwasher, you can tell Google Home to start it in an hour while it's still fresh in your mind. Then you sit down and watch a show for an hour.
The alternative is to crank the TV up to hear it over the dishwasher or start the dishwasher in an hour after your show is done - but that's easy enough to forget. It's a very real scenario.
As for the pre-heating the oven. Maybe I'm at my desk (I work from home) and wrapping up my day. I look at today's meal plan and see I need to bake some chicken. I can ask Google Home to get the oven started while I wrap up my day.
We're talking about a fully automated laundry that goes a step beyond a washing machine. It's funny, but one of the hardest unsolved problems is actually folding laundry. Everything else is very easy.
I want a robot that takes my clothes out and hangs them on the line, and is able to distinguish the few items I put in the dryer (socks, undies, towels, sheets).
There are just not that much things to automate at home
- laundry: separate my dirty laundry, load and run the washing machine when a laundry bucket is full enough, dry it and fold it
- same with dishes: load the dishwasher, run the correct program, put the dishes back in the cupboard
- vacuuming, dusting, cleaning windows, etc.
- fetch and OCR my (paper) mail, sort by bills/appointments/ads, automatically schedule appointments in my calendar and stage payments for authorization by me. Throw out the flyers.
Fuck you. I did not get into technology just so we can replace one type of menial labour with the exact same thing, just a different human. How does your proposed solution scale to include the maid's household?
I mean, all the turn-key stuff is terrible right now, but I've seen some awesome DIY stuff with Homeseer + IFTTT + bash scripts.
My friend's house turns on the front porch light when he gets home, auto-locks the front door if unlocked for more than X minutes, alerts of outside doors that have been open for more than X seconds, dims the lights when he turns on the TV, alerts him when his wife is almost home (she hates that), yells at the dog if he goes into his office, and a hell of a lot more. That said, he's logged dozens of hours getting everything working.
I'm dying for an Echo / Home that is fully api friendly and allows custom keywords. I want to buy an interface to my own home assistant. I want a hackers friend.
Sure, offline-capable would be great too, but for now just give me the damn api hooks. :s
edit: Note that i believe Echo has a pretty good API. I just don't want to talk to echo haha. I want to talk to my system.
The Echo not only allows you to extend its vocabulary, Amazon offers the Echo functionality as as a service that any developer can use from their own hardware.
If you wanted to use your own voice recognition and natural language processing, you could easily tie that into open source vocabulary that has been written for Echo.
Yea, i hear the API is quite good - i should have been more clear, it sounds like for me the main blocker is the trigger word.
But yea, what i would want is to literally take all input from the Echo, have amazon/echo transcribe it to text, and then send it to my code. Echo would then read the english response back.
Sorry, I might be totally off the base here but why not use IBM Watson for that? It's free for a thousand minutes in a month and it's speech-to-text looks quite good on the first glance.
I was just looking around for a custom solution to have something listening, send it off somewhere to get the text out of the voice command and then respond to keywords/contexts with appropriate custom-made actions. All you need then is to process that and read out the response.
No idea, does IBM Watson have a good in-home hardware device?
I'm not talking about using Echo to do any complex work, i want echo to just be my middle man taking in speech and sending my program the text. With of course, a customizable wake word.
I wasn't aware of IBM Watson having an Echo or Home like device. If it matches my needs, i'm very interested :)
ITT smart hackers asking for more features and noting the privacy implications. Unfortunately, this, Echo, and others are coming for the masses, the masses who have everything public on Facebook and won't really understand the issues until it's too late. Give it a few years and 'everyone' will have a Star-Trek-like home computer experience. What can we do to turn the tide in favor of privacy and security? Or do we just trust Google/Amazon will do the right thing?
My mom just got an Echo for Mother's Day. She's always been very apprehensive about government encroaching, so when I explained to her that the microphone was always on, at first she was surprised. Then I explained how could it know she needed something without always being on? Then I explained to her that we already know for a fact that the government records all data over the wire. And since Echo is plugged into the internet, we have to assume it's sending back every way she interacts with it. Now she's a bit more apprehensive about it. I feel like I did my job.
Lets stop this nonsense. They don't sell access to your personal information. There is nowhere that I can buy your personal information from google. What they sell is access to your attention. When advertising, I'm looking for people that match these characteristics, and what I'm purchasing is the possibility to show you an ad if you match certain criteria.
You are making a mighty fine distinction, one that sometimes makes no difference. You are also assuming that "access to attention" is perfectly firewalled from data, which it isn't. I know one person who is playing with what correlations can be made by getting people to click on google ads. I can't imagine he's the first.
You are also assuming that Google's policy will never change, Google's assets will never end up for sale, etc.[1]
Obviously, we weight these things differently. But calling it nonsense demonstrates either contempt for those you disagree with or a lack of thought on the matter.
[1] Sure, looks unlikely at the moment. But unless you think it is going to rival the Catholic Church for longevity, it is worth thinking about. The average corporate lifespan in the US is 27 years.
> The average corporate lifespan in the US is 27 years.
I wonder what the average lifespan is for companies that are already more than X years old, where X could be 1, 2, 5...
I'm thinking as a comparison to how the biggest increase in average lifespan for humans wasn't everyone dying a tiny bit later, it was infant mortality dropping massively.
Among the more fascinating results out of evolutionary biology and the Red Queen Hypothesis is that species survival probability is almost wholly independent of species age. That is: survival does not convey a survival benefit.
I don't know what the corresponding trend is for business ventures, but I suspect they may exhibit similar traits.
I am aware that various measures of corporate dominance are declining -- residency within the Dow Jones 30 Industrials, for example.
Period life expectancy is the term you are looking for, I think. Immediate googling does not provide a helpful answer.
Another interesting question would be Cohort life expectancy of corporations - that is, have corporations started in the 1990's lasted longer than those started in the 2000's? (obviously, the graph of corporations in the 2000's would have less data)
the original commenter said they "sell personal data". Yes this is nonsense. Yes every company is susceptible to breaches and every company has the ability to change TOS in the future. Not to belittle you but the only way to protect yourself is to live completely off the grid. As to the person, correlations != direct persons personal data.
No fears; I don't find it the least bit belittling when people assert factually incorrect things.
I don't know what you mean by "direct persons personal data". If it is supposed to mean that correlations don't reveal information that people would prefer to be kept private, either in general or specifically about my friend's results with Google ads, well, that's also wrong. I'm getting the feeling, though, that this is becoming unproductive.
They sell the ability to use your data, not to access/see/download it. I can use all the data for ad targeting, but in no way I can actually see it.
Advertisers buy the attention, Publishers sell it. Google is the intermediary that connects the right advertiser to the right publishers, and charges x%.
Yes! I find it so hypocritical of people who seems to be extra careful about their personal information. I understand this makes sense for some people, but for most of the others, Google using your meta-data to show things which might interest you and by also helping you with great applications is cool. Not everyone wants to pay for things to get privacy.
You appear to be saying that people who value privacy are hypocritical because you want free stuff and do not care about privacy. I can't find the logic in your comment.
That doesn't mean that they don't collect that information, however. They collect it, and then they use it to target ads at you.
A simple, plausible way this might invade your privacy in a meaningful way is that your home conversations will start being factored into the ads that your shown. Knowing this about Google, I can infer based on the ads shown to you, to some extent, what you are talking about in private.
Granted, the information is incomplete, and it is a noisy signal, but it is a signal nonetheless.
I don't understand this. Every company collects personal information. How do you think itunes delivers recommendations to get you to buy more music you like ? Yes just about every single company you use is collecting information on you and using it some way that benefits them.
Ya, I realize that. I wasn't taking a position on it morally. I was just pointing out that just because they don't sell the information as such doesn't mean that they don't leak the information via side channels.
If I am using your device momentarily or simply looking over your shoulder. Of course, this is already a security breach, but you wouldn't expect it to breach the security of private conversations you've had in your home, was my point.
Amazon makes $3B a year selling ads. You think they're just guessing about personal information? Please. They lay cookies everywhere (including off site) to target you properly.
Nest and Tony Fadell have a deeply product oriented philosophy - they clearly define what their product do and then go iterate till they get to the most aesthetically appealing, polished thing and release. Fadell brought that way of thinking with him from Apple, and from everything that's been published about his management style he's been able to sustain that attitude at Alphabet.
Home or any other AI/machine learning driven product needs to take a much more iterative approach. With those products you start by defining your platform goals and release that. Your product gets better through invisible improvements in your backend, not in the physical thing you sell to people. It makes sense that this product belong to the same team that built Chromecast.
You're right. When I got the Nest products I assumed Google would foster integration with them. If I can't raise my Nest thermometer by voice with this then that'll be Google training me once again to not invest in their platforms.
This is competing with the Amazon Echo. It's more oriented toward the Google brand because it's about searching for information. Obviously, Google still wants people to think of Google whenever they want to know something, even if the search is conducted by voice.
Apparently Nest are having trouble actually releasing anything. There were rumours in the press about this being developed outside of the Nest group for that reason a while back.
I find it odd that Google is going to take so long to get this out the door - "later this year" seems like ages. Did they start on the hardware that late?
Amazon has what, 6 months to get more competitive on the search/trivia front? or this is going to kill it.
The hardware for this is the easiest part. Understanding voice that's far from the microphone (sound gets muffled, echos off walls, etc.), with other sounds in the background, is significantly harder than understanding speech near the microphone.
"OK Google", Google Now, their voice recognition tech, and NLP recognition are far far past Echo's version. So if the hardware is that easy this should have been out yesterday. The even mentioned earlier in the keynote how they've been training it Google assistant with background noise.
Speech recognition is a lot harder than you'd think, and the problems of far field speech recognition especially. All of google's in-house ASR (and wakeword) has been dedicated to near-field devices.
Speech is not a "solve it once and it works everywhere" kind of problem.
I would ballpark that Google needed to collect 10k hours of _far-field_ speech to train this to a level that was acceptable for the enormous variety of noise conditions and accents that a far-field system needs to work on. That scale of data collection takes time and a lot of trench-warfare effort.
Sure I understand, but my point is that they should be ahead of the game on basically everything else. Echo was released over a year ago so surely Google has been working on far-field tech since _at least_ then.
To still be aiming for end of year seems like some serious missteps and catch-up going on.
Yes, except I trust Google FAR less than I trust Amazon--simply because Google has permeated in many more facets of my digital life (gdocs, gmail, chrome, maps, search, etc).
I don't really 'trust' either company, but the fact that I'm in so deep with Google already makes me less hesitant to add this one thing.
Google already knows me. I've basically slept with Google, so seeing me naked is just not a big deal. If Google uses that against me or gets compromised by a third party I'm screwed anyway and the transcripts from my living room will be the least of my worries.
I don't really understand this motivation. Google profiting from your actions doesn't necessarily mean that you're losing something. It's not a zero sum game between you and Google, there are other actors in the system.
A similar analogy would be how social systems are valued by their number of users. Their value is not coming from your pocket, you add value to them by being a user and they add value to you by providing you with some service that you enjoy (thus the reason you are a user of theirs). Granted, I understand if your reasoning is not wanting to "pay" more personal info to Google, I just wanted to point out that their profit has no net positive or negative impact on you in it's own right.
Ah okay. That's fair, I wasn't really considering it as an adversarial situation in terms of power. I was looking at it more from a "purchase this product" or not in an isolated decision.
Biologically, you're much better off with commensal organisms that expect to have a long, profitable relationship with you, giving you things you want and benefiting from you in return, rather than organisms with a shorter time horizon.
There is a lot that can be extrapolated from your shopping history, more than you think (e.g. if you've got a new house, a baby, if you have health problems, if you're a geek, if you like drinking or not...). And it's not just your shopping history that gets saved. It's your searches (whether you purchased or not), whatever links you searched/clicked to get to Amazon, your wishlists, and so on.
This can be said for any website or app you visit regularly. How deep they go and whether they act on this data or not is in question, but Data Analyst positions are becoming increasingly popular for a reason.
Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not. The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this.
Edit: Downvoters, please educate me on where I am wrong. Thanks.
I personally think this is ignorant. Its already been proven several times that if the government wants access to a companies data they will get it. The shutdown of Lavabit has proven this. Marissa Mayer said explicitly thats its treason to not go along with the NSA.
There is a large difference between being a PRISM partner( broad hoovering of all data )and a party to a narrowly-scoped warrant or subpoena, as Amazon would be.
Meyer would do well to cite the specific statute that makes noncompliance into a charge of treason. Otherwise she's clearly lying to spin the actions of Yahoo for PR points.
Well we can go through a back and forth on this but we'll never really know the true extent of PRISM as whats been speculated is they have a direct connection to ISP's so the reality is that they probably know more than what even an individual company knows. Both Google and Apple have said the same, any access requires court order.
Google: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data."[112] "[A]ny suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false."[113]
Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."[115]
Google is a very low-profile, high-importance contractor for the US Federal government, specifically for the intelligence agencies. It's kind of startling how little even HN readers know about this.
The belief that PRISM is targeted is 1. in contrast to the leaked slides, and 2. the determination of the PCLOB, which was appointed by . . . the executive branch of the US Government. The findings of the PCLOB are about as useful as lung cancer studies commissioned by Phillip-Morris.
PRISM partners' denials are, of course, standard and expected PR moves.
Is there any evidence that PRISM wasn't just the program where they tapped the private fiber lines between Google's data centers and siphoned off the data? That would fit in line with the code name (where they use a crystal to splice the light from the fiber line)...
I can't see the hundreds of people it would take at google staying quiet for this long about being involved in giving the NSA direct access to servers. There would be at least one whistle blower on that side of things...
Last time I checked, the only connection Google had with PRISM was their fiber optics being hacked by NSA. I don't recall any proof Google was actively cooperating with them.
If I had to fathom a guess, your downvotes may spring from "The NSA will likely record every sound from your house".
I don't know much on all the subjects that would converge over _the NSA storing all the audio from everyones house_ but it seems unlikely. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about though.
>Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not.
We simply have no way of knowing, and our best guess is that the NSA/CIA/HS/FBI gets their own backdoor private APIs to any data source they want, Amazon included.
> The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this.
It would be very easy to detect something fishy was going on. Even if the device was locked down and the connection was encrypted, they couldn't hide it if the device was uploading large volumes of data with no explanation.
You don't need to upload large volumes of data for voice recognition (see Siri), and if you're only looking for specific keywords/sentences you can trickle the data over time.
Yes, but that's not what the person I was responding to said. They said the NSA would record every sound in the house, which would require a detectable amount of bandwidth even at low bitrates.
The hotword detection (OK Google/Hey Siri/Alexa) currently happens on the device - it would be terribly inefficient to do that in the cloud. If a security researcher notices their Google Home is transmitting significant amounts of data without them using the "OK Google" prompt, that would raise eyebrows.
Siri, Google Now, and the Amazon Echo do audio processing in the cloud, but only after they've been triggered by "OK Google" "Hey Siri", or "Alexa". (Or by hitting a button.) It'd be pretty odd, and terribly inefficient, if the Google Home did hotword detection in the cloud.
I upvoted you before you went grey because I do think that's a salient point, but I would guess you're being downvoted because the suggestion that the NSA will record the activity in your home around the clock is considered excessively paranoid. These devices usually perform hotword detection locally and don't start sending data up to the cloud until the hotword is spoken, at which point they capture only a few seconds of audio.
Beyond that, there's really no difference between Google Home and a Nexus phone. If Google wanted to record all of the audio around you, they're already equipped to do so for like 50% of the population that runs Android (and there has been speculation that intel agencies are able to remotely activate cell phone microphones and listen in).
The page linked here is basically an ad with no content (yet it manages to have a scrollbar no matter the window size...). Tried to look for actual specs but couldn't find anything, does anybody have anything more substantial?
On another note, is there a way to just get some sort of remote microphone array (I think that's what it's called on the Echo) and set up Alexa/Google/Cortana/... directly on a PC?
Thanks! One of the points for me is also to be able to customize the software, so that looks like an excellent start.
The hardware is still a problem, I've tried to find microphones like the one on the Echo, but the few that seem to meet the requirements basically cost half of the Echo. I'm not particularly knowledgeable when it comes to microphones, so I may very well be looking in the wrong places.
As somoene who runs a small ecommerce company i'm really hoping the next platform is open, and not owned by Amazon (or Google). I sell products where purchasing them would be fantastic via a voice interface. If Amazon owns it though, there's no way I'm going to get any fraction of that business. The ownership of these voice platforms is a huge risk for market competition. The voice interface naturally lends itself to "choose the first choice that fits my paramters, and let's go with it". If you say "Alexa, book me a taxi to the airport". Alexa chooses who takes you. Being the priority choice is a huge advantage for whoever wins that. It's just so much power in the hands of so few. It's the opposite of what the internet should've been.
Sounds like what happened with messaging platforms in China. WeChat became the single bundled platform for mobile and thus got to play kingmaker with default service providers. I agree with your opinion, although it feels like a natural progression as the sheer number of services grows at a rapid pace and its the attempt to remove friction built up from the excessive overhead of choice.
I'm confident that Amazon won't kill off Alexa (due to its success). I am not so confident that if this isn't widely successful or even in the future this will be killed off just like Revolv and bricking the device . It is good that Alexa is getting competition though.
Microsoft, where are you? Cortana on a device that is similar to the chip Master Chief has would be incredibly popular, and it done right could also be just as popular. Especially since Cortana is on every platform and completely agnostic unlike Google Home and Echo. Give it the same extensible API as Cortana has on Windows 10, etc and it could be a home run. Don't let Google and Amazon eat your lunch here.
I do wonder though how Google/Microsoft/Apple will handle there being multiple instances of their devices able to take commands. So if I say "Hey Cortana" or "Ok Google" will each device have to sort of communicate with the other to only activate the one that is closest?
It's scary how close this is to being one of 1984's telescreen devices. I might even argue that it basically _is_ a telescreen considering Google's previous dealings with state actors, though with some of the 451-style "you asked for this" as opposed to the 1984-style "this is forced on you".
The difference between this product and 1984 is that we choose to install Google home into our places of residence for our own convenience. We are not forced into installing said software.
That having been said, if Google chooses to release the data to the government, it has an obligation to tell us about that or it will be behaving unethically. As matters stand, however, this is just a new technology with pros and cons.
Both have to be specifically placed, however. Common devices with location tracking and audio monitoring capabilities already exist. They can be targeted for monitoring, and to the best of my knowledge, are.
Some are actively monitoring activity on an ongoing basis -- e.g., someone's voice-enabled TV sets. I really can't even keep up with all this crap any more.
All of which is moot to the original point: that people can choose whether or not this equipment is in their environment or not. Effectively they cannot.
> All of which is moot to the original point: that people can choose whether or not this equipment is in their environment or not. Effectively they cannot.
Absolutely. Just pointing out that we're on the path to adding always on cloud connected far field microphones in every other house in the country. Good luck "choosing" to not be listened to. The largest danger is self-censorship. "What is the risk somebody is listening to non-correct speech? I'd better watch what I say and not formulate non-correct speech."
Until being the only person without one is seen a sign of guilt.
Similar to bodycams for people like teachers or police. People argue they can wear them if they like to protect themselves against accusations, until they are so widely used that opting-out is not longer an option because it's seen a sign you are hiding something.
> That having been said, if Google chooses to release the data to the government, it has an obligation to tell us about that or it will be behaving unethically.
No, as far as I know that would be incorrect with NSLs in place. Gag order and such.
Only if the phone is connected to a charger, at least on mine. If it could always do "ok Google" on a phone regardless of whether or not it is connected, it would be infinitely more useful. Since I opted in to use Google Now in the first place, I actually want that.
Competition in this space is welcome! Can't wait to see what their difference / what sets them apart from Echo. Given Google's propensity to sell Ads, it will be interesting to see if customers are willing to put a device like this in their house.
Looks neat, let's hope Google leads in 3rd party applications too and not just in appearance. Also interesting that they specifically gave a shout out to the Alexa team.
I love how they put the LG MusicFlow Speaker on the Home presentation. I've been suffering that malpurchase for about a year now. I can rely on it not working 70% of the time, seemingly crashing, creating a mesh wifi although plugged into ethernet or attached to my home wi-fi...
If they can't get the third party vendors to get their Google Cast integration up to the reliability level of a Chromecast Audio, they should stop supporting this.
I think the most interesting thing in the echo and now google home narrative is that these are subsets of phones. Speakers, microphones and internet connections with only two substantial differences - they are powered 100% of the time and they have better speakers/acoustics. It will be interesting to see if those are substantial enough to overwhelm the obviousness of doing these through the phone in your pocket.
I've toyed around a bit with making a phone very capable with voice commands and it's not easy. Lots and lots of tinkering.
I would love for there to be something out there akin to what echo has, with programmable skills, and hopefully able to put things onto a chromecast. I would have a lot of fun tinkering with that.
What's the business model for Google Home? Will it suddenly splurt out an advertising message in the middle of the night, or will it rather include subtle product placements in otherwise harmless answers?
Remember, it's made by a company that thinks it's appropriate to put text ads on the first spots of your search results, in increasingly confusing ways.
I doesn't have to have a business model. If voice activated devices turn out to be the future of search, and the voice device in your home is not made by Google, than Google is dead. Roughly speaking of course.
It seems every google product is more invasive than the last. It makes me wonder if google sees a golden opportunity or is pushed into this themselves. I get the feeling people aren't really clamoring for these types of invasive products.
It reminds me of webcams in laptops. Overnight it appeared that manufacturers were including them as a non-optional component. Yet it never seems to be something the public really cares for at all.
How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject?
> How many months from release until the FISA court issues a secret order to turn one of these on 24x7x365 in a suspect's home, and stream the audio to the FBI "counter terrorism" people investigating a subject?
Google Home isn't the first entry into this market (Amazon Echo is a thing), and neither of those is the first network-connected microphone-bearing device in people's homes that might be targeted, so its kind of weird to focus on this particular product for that question.
It might be the first one to pass some sort of critical mass of consumer adoption, and within a few years have 10x the market share of Amazon Echo. Depends how much Google subsidizes the hardware and how much they advertise/push it in their other platforms.
The search queries that get sent to Google are probably the least interesting part of this to them. Sure, Google will get some additional search queries and be able to target you slightly better, but it's a rounding error in terms of the data they already have.
The interest in this on Google's side is on having a permanently connected 'listener' on your network to identify which devices you're running and when. If it's running through your WiFi network, Google is going to know about it.
I love my Echo but it has a couple weak points, all of which could be solved by a competent platform. I can't, for instance, just tell Alexa to play new podcasts from my lists or directly from the net (except through TuneIn, which sucks.) It doesn't work with many home automation devices. It's AI is not that great when it comes to non-Amazon services.
I'm hopeful the Android platform will make this a better device.
You're not the only one, I think your "[looking] like a plug in air freshener really" comment is pretty close to my perception of it. The render looks really goofy to me, not half as nice as Echo. However, I like the idea of the slanted top so you can see the lights (which presumably are information bearing and not just branding?). Presumably the top part, at least, would quickly be a target for aftermarket accessory companies so it could match your home interior.
Remember when voice commands for your computer came out? It was cool but nobody talks to their computer. They won't be talking aimlessly in their kitchen either.
This is such an odd statement as it's already been proven false. The Echo is already quite popular. I gave one to my 70 year old technophobe mom and she uses it in the kitchen all the time. I use mine everyday.
Hope this is not as disappointing as Onhub, it would be helpful if they have a rich api to start with and not promise that the APIs are coming later...
That page is so simple, yet even Google devs are "powering" these simple pages with multiple JS files. Why? Is it laziness? Or just some belief that Angular is required now for even "hello world"?
When viewing source I initially thought 'great, a nice clean HTML page'... after all, it's just 3 images fading between each other and a simple form.
But then at the bottom we see Angular, Angular Animate, Angular Scroll, and a fourth Main JS file. Way to set an example Google.
Initially after snowden I thought, "the government and governments around the world will crack down on this behavior now".
I was naïve. Nobody cares. Now they viciously support such practices. As long as that exists, I can't buy into datamining devices. And it will always exist.
Seriously, never in my wildest dreams did I think that technology would come down to this. Like many others, I dreamed a future where I could have an automated assistant at home. Just not this way! It's really all about ads and mining data, isn't it.
Amazon echo is about 179 right now. I'm really hoping google can get this to be about 100 - 125. Based on their history of low cost devices with the two chromecasts, I think its possible.
They'd only need to be friendlier to international buyers than the Echo (which you can use elsewhere, but with some mucking around) and they'll do well.
The best and easiest features of Amazon Echo don't need the most difficult local support. Things like the shopping list sans buying, timers, weather, timezones, traffic, etc.
You say that like its a bad thing.
I busted my back yesterday at the gym with improper form on a dead lift.
If I had some kind of assistant watching me to correct my form then I would not be eating pain killers now trying to get an appointment to see a doctor all while having tingling sensations in my feet.
Now, I just see an internet-connected microphone in a software black box which I can only interpret as a giant frickin' security liability. I want this, but unless it's open source top-to-bottom, I won't ever actually put one in my home. We know too much about how these things can be abused for me to ever seriously consider it without being able to verify for myself what it's doing and why.