Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Who pays for Alexa?
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Maybe I misread the actual text, but it sounds like the exact opposite, that it's going to auto-delete what you say.
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Who pays for Alexa?
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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.
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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!
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.
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This is legal, even in the US?
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If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to 'Don't save recordings,' please follow these steps before March 28th:
Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.
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How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these
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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.
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This is legal, even in the US?
"Even in the US" seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.
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"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.
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How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these
The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.
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Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?
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"Even in the US" seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.
"Leopards can eat people's faces, even in the US?"
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The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.
At least, on mobile devices, it's typically easier to install a privacy-focused firmware (like LineageOS or GrapheneOS). Those AI assistants are completely locked down.
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If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to 'Don't save recordings,' please follow these steps before March 28th:
Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.
- Unplug your amazon echo devices
- Hit it with a hammer
- Send it to an electronics recycler
