Writing in Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson discusses the rise and rise of “Edge AI” startups that sell lightweight machine-learning classifiers that run on low-powered chips and don’t talk to the cloud, meaning that they are privacy respecting and energy efficient.
Tag: voice assistants
Rhasspy: a free/open voice assistant toolkit that’s fully offline
US Air Force research scientist Michael Hansen created Rhasspy as a privacy-oriented alternative to surveilling “voice assistant” products like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri; the free/open project supports dozens of languages from German, French and English to Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian, and is designed to run on Raspberry Pi-based devices.
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2019 was the year of voice assistant privacy dumpster fires
2019 was the “I Told You So” year for privacy advocates and voice assistants: the year in which every company that wanted you to trust them to put an always-on mic in the most intimate places in your home was revealed to have allowed thousands of low-waged contractors to listen in on millions of clips, many of them accidentally recorded: first it was Amazon (and again!), then Google, then Apple, then Microsoft.
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Like Amazon, Google sends voice assistant recordings to contractors for transcription, including recordings made inadvertently
After Bloomberg revealed that Amazon secretly sent recordings from Alexa to subcontractors all over the world in order to improve its speech-recognition systems, a whistleblower leaked recordings from Google Home to investigative reporters from VRT, revealing that Google, too, was sending audio clips from its voice assistant technology to pieceworkers through the Crowdsource app.
The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen
The reason Google Assistant (that’s the product you invoke when you say “OK Google” to your device) works reasonably well is that the Pygmalion team — a small army of linguists — work long hours handcrafting variations on common phrases (“set a timer for five minutes,” “remind me in five minutes,” “in five minutes, remind me…”) and grammars that allow the system to correctly respond to your queries.
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New Amazon patent application reveals “solution” to missed Alexa instructions: always on recording
When you talk to Alexa and other voice assistants, you have to phrase your requests by starting with their “wakeword” (“Alexa” “OK Google” “Siri” etc).
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Amazon stores recordings of Alexa interactions and turns them over to internal staff and outside contractors for review
Bloomberg reporters learned that — despite public pronouncements to the contrary — Amazon has an “annotation team” of thousands of people all over the world, charged with reviewing recordings made by Alexa devices in the field, with both staffers and contractors listening to conversations that Alexa owners have had with and near their devices.
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The Russian equivalent to Alexa is a “good girl” but not too friendly, and is totally OK with wife-beating
Yandex is Russia’s answer to Weibo, an everything-under-one-(semi-state-controlled)-roof online service, and its answer to Alexa is Alisa.
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Voice assistants suck, but they suck worse if you have an “accent”
Research into the shittiness of voice assistants zeroed in on a problem that many people were all-too-aware of: the inability of these devices to recognize “accented” speech (“accented” in quotes because there is no one formally correct English, and the most widely spoken English variants, such as Indian English, fall into this “accented” category).
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Voice assistants suck (empirically)
New research from legendary usability researchers The Nielsen (previously) Norman (previously) Group finds that voice assistants are basically a hot mess that people only use because they are marginally better than nothing.