If Corporations were people, they’d be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.
Which is why they’re not people.
Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that’s definitely what they are doing.
There’s no way they weren’t doing this already.
I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.
For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it’s got an aux out port.
I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.
That’s tempting, and not a hideous price either.
What is Alexa. Lol
Alexa! Install Linux!
🔴 I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.
If you were using one, you were already okay with this.
Yeah. Hell, chances are they were already
Yeah, just avoid the oligarchy tech
I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.
That doesn’t matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.
Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.
true, but there’s a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.
Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.
And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.
Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It’s very liberating and I don’t miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.
Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois
Who pays for Alexa?
Plenty of people I know have gotten the little echo dots or the bigger alternative with larger speakers for Christmas or birthdays. Technically they didn’t spend money, but their friends and family did.
I see. The initial purchase price is the “payment”. I thought the intimation was some sort of subscription to use Alexa. My bad.
Everyone who didn’t get an echo as a gift, I’d imagine
They typed from their device that is also spying on them that they most likely also paid for…
Please, sir I have a pager
They literally could just leave the feature on the device, but then you can’t force your users to send you all their data, voices, thoughts and first borns
Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos
Which Echo devices ever supported local only processing? They cost about £30. There’s no kit that can do decent voice commands for that money. You’d be lucky to have a device that processes claps to turn the lights on for that.
Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?
Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!
I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.
If you have a “To Do” list, and speak “Add cooking to my To Do list”, it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:
- Todo
- To-do
- to do
- ToDo
- To-Do
- …
The system will say it couldn’t find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,… and you have very little control over this.
HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.
They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people’s hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.
I do not understand why there’s no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.
Because it takes time to implement. It will come.
I’ve seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it’s usually a conversation I’m nowhere close to understanding lol
Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?
home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.
If anyone remembers the Mycroft Mark II Voice Assistant Kickstarter and was disappointed when development challenges and patent trolls caused the company’s untimely demise, know that hope is not lost for a FOSS/OSHW voice assistant insulated from Big Tech…
FAQ: OVOS, Neon, and the Future of the Mycroft Voice Assistant
Disclaimer: I do not represent any of these organizations in any way; I just believe in their mission and wish them all the success in getting there by spreading the word.
This is legal, even in the US?
“Even in the US” seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.
“This is legal, even there?” sounds pretty “legal bad there” to me.
“Leopards can eat people’s faces, even in the US?”
I didn’t even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.
- Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
- Locally listen for the wake word (typically “Alexa”) using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
- Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
- Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)
Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don’t see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.
Also, while they may be “always recording” they don’t transmit everything. It’s only so if you say “Alexaturnthelightsoff” really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.
I’m not trying to defend Amazon, and I don’t necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn’t seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn’t know.
It was a non advertised feature only available in the US and in English only
