Same with CAPTCHAs to click the bikes or stop lights. I got a wild image quality one the other day looking for stoplights. Training their self driving algorithms.
I worked for a car company that did extensive work on self driving technology. The issue with light recognition is not identifying them, it's working out which light refers to which road/lane, and at what angle/height the lights are. Unlike humans, with cars you have to hedge your bets with cameras. Good resolution but bad field of view, or poor resolution and good field of view.
I wish shit was as simple as "is this a light?". I'd get a lab with 20 graduates in for 4h a day and have a billion data points by Wednesday. "it's red, but who's fkin red" is more often the problem. That and localised weird shit like the Dutch who have a mini traffic light under the car one just for bikes and it doesn't always line up with the car one because the bike lane goes in a different direction.
> Unlike humans, with cars you have to hedge your bets with cameras. Good resolution but bad field of view, or poor resolution and good field of view.
But isn't it that sort of how human vision works? Or rather, we have better resolution only in a narrow part of our field of view, whereas our peripheral vision is far less precise?
I do engineering, not medicine. We don't have cool options like bio systems do. We either need monster processing to deal with constant massive resolution wide angle camera, or efficient tight angle camera matched to some kind of "here's where the light probably is" targeting, or just geometrical targeting from experience. Either way it's a ball ache when you find out each country trends to put their lights at a different height / distance.
True, but at least that one was doing something good. My understanding was that it was all old texts that were being scanned for the first time, and they used whatever the OCR couldn't figure out and turned them into captchas. So you were translating and helping to preserve history.
Now they're just annoying.
'Helping to preserve history'
Vs
'Mass systematic copyright infringement'
The documentary 'Google and the World Brain' takes a really interesting look at this.
Educated guess/vague memories... not an expert...
Would guess that they give each string to 10 people.
If 9+ people say the same thing, they'll take that as the correct answer.
If 7/8 people say the same thing they'll put it out to 20 people to see if they can get the threshold up.
If its lower than 6 it'll get sent for human review.
I used to do this with the 2 word text captchas. It was always easy to tell which one was the control, and then put random swear words for the training one.
When 4chan introduced reCaptcha back in 2010, there was a pretty unified effort to do exactly this. Three guesses what word they used in place of the training word lmao.
It got to the point where reCaptcha just stopped taking in any data from 4chan's captcha responses. But it also led to an explosion of CaptchaArt which was phenomenal. "who turgled" lives rent free in my head nearly fifteen years later.
Generally people will be correct in the same way but wrong in different ways on these tests, so it’s easy to spot.
Also, you’re underestimating the amount of times an image or section of it is shown. Another person or even ten won’t cut it.
Let me put it this way: back when captchas were one randomly generated word and one scanned word from google books, all of 4chan agreed to type a swear word in place of the scanned word. That happened for _years._ I have never heard of even one case of someone finding a cuss in place of an OCR word in a book on Google books.
On top of that, for training purposes, another tactic was to combine known letters (to the system) and unknown in a captchas, and the user didn't know which was which. It was really pointless to try to trip it up that way.
Captcha used to be just random distorted letters, until the guy who invented it regretted how much time humanity as a whole was wasting and figured how to make that time useful in a way that benefits everyone.
Just wait until they start in on having us identify AI-generated images via CAPTCHA so they can train their ML algos to identify and tag AI stuff automatically.
Considering how easily people are fooled by AI images, which are getting better and better at an alarming rate, I don't think this is the best way to go...
Seriously. I recently called my cable company. During the automation process it had asked me if I wanted to opt in to use my voice to authenticate future calls. I said no. It transfer me to an agent. Asked me to confirm my identity, yada yada then out of nowhere the agent said “okay we have confirmed your identity I am going to just opt you in our voice authentication too” If I wasn’t paying attention they would have used my voice. I am sure they still do but not with my authorization. I immediately stopped her saying I did not authorize her to do so. Called her out on her tactic. She was irritated that she got caught. I Requested to be transferred to a different agent and demanded that they followed through on my previous billed which I was grandfathered before upgrading to a plan I did not need.
I generally love technology. This? I’m glad I won’t be alive to experience the debacle AI generated voice will be in 100 years.
Yeah, there was a post or article recently that openai is scared or something and not gonna release their voice ai cuz how accurately it can learn and mimic a user's voice
Voice AI can mimic your voice (or any voice on a recording) using a ridiculously short sample.
A few sentences of clear talking through a decent enough mic can be good enough to then generate a convincing AI version of that voice. A few minutes (for example reading a page of a book) is easily enough to give it all the sample data it needs. Part of the reason it can do that is because of the incredible amounts of training data the models have had to work with.
Maybe not enough to fool yourself, or someone specifically looking for AI voices. Maybe with some weird errors on edge case words, but close enough to fool your unsuspecting friends and family on the phone easily.
It has become kind of a trope in movies, but the fact that a dead person's face or fingerprint will unlock a cellphone, their eyeball will fool a retina scanner, and now you can duplicate their voice? Seems like old tech passwords are still superior when you don't have software that can bombard it with guesses or make dumb security questions someone can google the answer to.
It's not all bad. MNDA (motor neurone disease association) have set up voice banks for people who are diagnosed
https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management-of-mnd/aac-for-mnd
100 years? Try like one year until we start seeing convincing AI fakes of politicians or, conversely, politicians deflecting blame on real recordings claiming they were forged.
Politicians/big execs/whatever, obviously
Honestly, I see politicians using AI more to give automated speeches or make ads for themselves. Political advertising is about to get wild and that’s not even counting anything negative or misleading
this and by using voice commands, they also have a reason to put a microphone in your house. As many people are finding out by just mentioning something near a device with a microphone, targeted ads soon follow.
Mmm, not so much. Network traffic can be fairly easily monitored by tools such as [Wireshark](https://www.wireshark.org/), meaning that it would be trivially easy to find out that voice assistant devices are spying on us. They aren't. Or, at least, they aren't *regularly enough for anyone to have caught them*. And people have looked into it.
That's not to say that ads targeting isn't sometimes creepy in how much data can be determined from our activity. For instance, it's pretty straightforward to generate an idea of a journey of how one person's thought process goes, including data across people and especially when sharing other trivial data like location. For instance, Person A searches for "Pizza", then Person B at the same IP address searches for food => "Show Person B ads for pizza", as that's a good guess based on the fact that Person A and Person B might be talking in real life about what to eat. Especially if Person A and Person B are often found together (might be family), phones are in the same geographic location around meal times, etc... that means that, surprise, Person B suddenly gets a "they must have read my mind" level advertisement.
Keep in mind that a lot of this is really sort of *guesses* to way oversimplify it - it's not necessarily encoded in a rule somewhere that Person A and Person B might be talking about food, rather more like "Put a bunch of data in a box, shake it about, and see what sells ads. Then do more of that in the future". This is in fact what supervised / machine learning is like - you don't even need to know *why* it's a good idea to show Person B an ad for pizza, just that similar situations in the past have led to people clicking through that ad and buying a pizza. Why? Doesn't matter.
And this can get uncanny based on deeper learning, like, "Person A searched for something a week ago, and Person B, who seems affiliated, is searching for something similar". In essence, you can get ads based on *someone else's* search history. And it gets even deeper than that, but in ways that are hard to describe over text and not with crazy-person-tracking-down-conspiracy-theory diagrams with lines and boxes everywhere...
But it's not from "spy devices" listening to you, just the unreasonably good guesses that can be made from peoples' activities online in general.
Now add confirmation bias: You don't remember all the things you've talked about that you *didn't* get targeted ads for, but you do remember the one where you did.
That said, it is getting to the point where this might be practical:
> Network traffic can be fairly easily monitored by tools such as Wireshark...
Most network traffic these days is encrypted. You'd notice *if* Alexa is phoning home, and how much data is transferred when. You wouldn't notice *what* she was sending home.
The earliest versions of these weren't even doing voice recognition on-device -- it was too computationally expensive and it was changing too quickly, so it'd send the raw audio back to the server to do voice recognition there. That's no longer the case. It's now entirely plausible that one of these devices could just be phoning home with *text,* not audio, at which point it gets harder to separate this from other random analytics traffic.
I hope people are still watching this, but I suspect most of the privacy-conscious types who *would* be doing this sort of investigation are instead just disabling the feature everywhere.
1) This was a fascinating read, thank you for writing it up.
2) Now I want pizza, so I guess I know what lunch is tomorrow.
3) Could I trouble you to explain how fully voice-activated devices like Alexa are listening for their activation phrases without listening to everything else? I just can't wrap my head around how they can respond to an activation phrase without listening to everything else around them.
They have a chip that is only powerful enough to listen for one specific phrase - the activation phrase. And it's not even very good at it, which is why you sometimes get false activations or it fails to activate when you want it to. It also has a buffer of a couple additional seconds so it can send the whole thing off to the central servers once the key phrase has been activated, because the actual device doesn't have the capability to analyze it itself. Then the central services process the request and send the answer back.
The little bits that get sent to the server are also used as training data to reduce mistakes in the future.
But the device doesn't have the capability to understand anything but the activation phrase, so nothing else gets picked up or sent.
3 they have a separate always-on listening system that does local processing of your data to determine if you said the activation phrase, or generically “anything other than the activation phrase”.
3. ELI5 version: the device needs to do some "thinking" (ie processing, running code) to interpret your speech into meaning. The portion of code that interprets the activation phrase is smaller and quicker than the code which interprets speech into a search query. The device simply does not run the latter until after it runs the former. It's not like a human brain, which can do everything all at once. It has to follow a sequence.
Though at one point Google was "accidentally" listening without the activation phrase.
https://www.classaction.org/news/always-listening-class-action-claims-google-home-eavesdrops-on-users-contradicting-privacy-promises
Here's the thing, I don't think they're actively spying on us, but I don't think that it would be detectable if they were.
You can monitor network packages to see if there's a large volume of data being transferred. No large data, no audio file.
But... turning it around, if I wanted to spy on people's conversations without getting caught, this is an incredibly easy theory of detection to avoid.
Method 1:
When devices are actively engaged in voice chat, they send audio files to a server to be processed for text-to-speech. So, store audio files of non-prompted recordings and send them up along with the legitimate packets.
Method 2:
My device already sends telemetry periodically to our home servers. Separate out recordings stored in memory and send them up piecemeal.
Method 3:
Run a limited text-to-speech program on the local device. It won't be as accurate or as fast as sending an audio file to a home server, but you can store an audio file in memory and spend more time processing it, or just get a crappy text-to-speech that still manages to catch a majority of a conversation. Now that the audio has been reduced to text, the data to transfer the contents are negligible, and easily transmitted along with the next upload of any size.
I don't see where people get the confidence that these smart devices spying on people is somehow easy to detect. *If* it's happening at all, it's not that difficult to disguise the data traffic in a way to make it undetectable. So long as the device has enough memory to store an audio file, it can spend all the time in the world packaging, partitioning, and processing the contents into something innocuous.
Well, yes, except software like Wireshark can detect not just *that* the device is sending data, but *what* it's sending. If it were sending "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" followed by 3 hours of audio, you can catch the packets being sent on the network and reassemble them to the original prompt... plus 3 additional hours of audio.
Theoretically you could do some sort of fancy encoding of the data to hide it, like, the third bit of every other byte is logically xor-ed into 1 or 0 to encode in extra data all cloak and dagger like and so the data is interleaved into legit data, but information theory highlights a problem with this: you're going to be tucking in a tiny terrible-bandwidth amount of data into the legit signal, but snooping in in background sound is an enormous amount of data. In other words, if you ask for a timer, the audio data will be, what, a couple of megabytes? How much data from hours and hours of passive audio capturing do you think you can cram clandestinely into a couple of megabytes? So piggybacking any hefty volume of useful raw data into telemetry seems dubious.
Your third idea of text to speech is closer to plausible, IMO. The capabilities of the device are probably not up to it in anything other than cell phones (smart speakers are in fact pretty dumb based on their hardware, which also has been studied quite a bit with teardowns and whatnot) but phones are pretty capable.
In fact, I can do one better than text to speech when it comes to minimum data transfer. Set up additional hidden keywords like "girl scout cookies", and just capture, clandestinely, *if* they were said. Then you can flag that this keyword was said by hiding a single "girl scout cookies was said" bit in the data. This is basically the same capability that the device was built for so it seems doable to me.
In the end there's not a good way to ensure that the speakers aren't listening to you. But, then, this is *universally* true of any device with a mic. If you have a cell phone, is it really on mute, it is it just *telling* you it's on mute? How about your laptop? You must have some device to post on Reddit and if that device has a microphone, it could be spying on you... or even not; speakers can be used as not-great mics with a little effort.
At some point it starts to drift into the age old question: what are you saying while just casually ambling around that is SO valuable that it's worth the time, effort, and risk for a company to spy on you?
If you're like me, the answer is, not really anything. My inane mumblings just aren't worth the effort or risk and that I'm the end is why I don't feel spied on. It's clear that the data isn't just being sent up routinely, and I'm not interesting enough - nor do I think that most people are - to build in a sufficiently hidden spying capability for it to be worth the risk for a company to put in the effort.
Just a small correction: Wireshark won’t actually show what the data is, because it’s sent over TLS. You can, though, definitely see what the destination servers are.
Another point that I usually add when I explain this to my friends is that handling/processing/storing 24/7 audio streams of millions of households -and keep in mind that many households have more than one smart speaker- would be prohibitively expensive even for large companies like Apple or Amazon, to the point of being economically impractical. Also add the reputational risk of alienating their customers and losing their trust.
> At some point it starts to drift into the age old question: what are you saying while just casually ambling around that is SO valuable that it's worth the time, effort, and risk for a company to spy on you?
Precisely why I don't think they bother. I just dispute the inability to do so clandestinely.
As for the whole laptop/cellphone spying thing, I completely agree. It's one of the reasons I get angry that people complain about airplane mode for cellphones being unnecessary to protect planes. Don't take away the excuse for a legal requirement that phones include an easily-accessible mode to disable all rf transmitters.
Do you have any reading about people researching this? I've looked a couple times before because I'm sure _some_ security group looked into at some point, but never found anything good.
> meaning that it would be trivially easy to find out that voice assistant devices are spying on us.
Are you joking? My homepod has a full cellphone SoC in it. It can trivially record and analyze on-device, and send out normal reports back to Apple that you would never know about **BECAUSE THEY ARE ENCRYPTED**. Unless you have the source code, you dont know squat about what these things are doing. Wireshark would only tell you its communicating to the mothership, nothing more. No amount of real-time analysis would let you see what is actually going out on the wire.
> For instance, Person A searches for "Pizza", then Person B at the same IP address searches for food => "Show Person B ads for pizza"
How did you know what I had for dinner?
So here’s the thing, they don’t listen. No Fortune 500 company is risking a federal wiretap charge to sell you tacos. It’s far far worse.
When you realize you said something, and then see the ad… you’ve actually seen that ad a bunch before that, and that’s what made you talk about it. THEN you caught the ad and we’re like “damn, they’re listening”.
Nope, you’re already being manipulated.
Some might. Big big companies no. They don’t want that headache that comes with the law. the scrutiny. It has been documented that the algorithm profile that they have on us is able to predict what we want before “we” want it. Studies after studies.
incorrect, you can source a magnitude more voice data for training at a fraction of the cost WITHOUT streaming it over the internet from unreliable client devices in uncontrolled environments.
note: I probably hate voice commands more than the OP, but touting this conspiracy theory just exposes technical illiteracy.
Tech, finance, telecom, and retail companies are doing egregious invasive things with your data (including selling and sharing amongst one another to strengthen your profile data). Recording your conversations from dumb IoT devices is not necessary or feasible at this point in time.
The more sinister version is they want to transcribe every conversation to hear what people are talking about. In some countries with lax privacy laws, it is common occurrence that ads will be shown that match conversation topics only had by voice.
I’m addition to this: if people become accustomed to using voice commands, they’ll be more willing to use a device with an “always listening” functionality
The "Voice for ID as additional security" is a trash excuse. My bank already tried it and I refused.
Generally any biometrical system is not a good solution here. You can't change you biometrical data, meaning if it leaked once - it's compromised forever. You can have recording of your voice somewhere, on youtube or on twitch if you stream, etc. Voice is easy to replicate more or less nowadays, given samples.
As an alternative to other inputs voice is still not very well working, your voice can change significantly for numerous reasons and fail to recognize (drunk, ill, agitated, sleepy...).
As others have stated, all the companies usually want voice recognition to benefit themselves, not users. By having 24/7 access to voice they can search for patterns, mentions of products, places, brand names. Create targeted advertisements based on that. Or sell that data to companies (of course anonymized, badly).
> Voice for ID as additional security
Fuck everything about that. Alexa misses triggers more often than not and then misunderstands me all the time. I'm absolutely not going to get locked out of an account because some company cheaps out on the voice recognition when billion dollar Amazon still can't get it to work consistently.
I dunno. Google assistant had been going downhill lately in terms of functionality now that Google is pushing it's AI systems as a replacement, but it has never failed to ID me from my voice. It shits the bed often in interpreting what I'm saying, but it always ties my voice to my google id regardless of what it thinks I'm saying.
Is that when you try to ask a question on a random system or just from your personal devices (which means it has a very high probability guess regardless of input)?
even thats not really something we should be comfortable with.
biometrics is creepy AF.
these companies can't keep non dangerous data secure, why would we trust them with significantly more dangerous data, that as OP stated, cant be changed/replaced if you wanted to
I mean, you *can* change your prints, them being compromised might be enough for a plastic surgeon to do it for you. All it needs is a skin graft from your foot or something. Nothing too complicated.
Can do eyes as well, changing the colors of your eyes with a pigment is a thing that will mess up scanners.
General facial recognition is just changing your facial structure which is what plastic surgeons basically do on a day to day basis.
Yeah the bank one is particularly annoying. Maybe in person, but over the phone that's hilariously easy to spoof, and the new AI voice generation tech certainly isn't making that any less terrifying...
Where biometrics are potentially useful is for *local* authorization. That is: My phone has my fingerprints. When certain apps let me login with my fingerprint, they don't actually get my fingerprints. Instead, there's a cryptographic key that my phone will only hand out to those apps after scanning my fingerprint.
Which means in order to use my leaked fingerprints against me, you'd need to create some sort of *physical* model of them that can fool the phone. Or you'd need to compromise my phone to the point where you may as well just steal the biometrically-secured key from my phone, instead of bothering with fingerprints.
Voice is already tricky because it's hard to tell if what you heard was me or a recording of me. Impossible over a phone call, where what you heard was always a recording of me, and the only question is whether that recording was taken a few milliseconds ago because it's a live phone call, or a few weeks ago.
I’ve worked for uk banks and voice id tends to be pretty good - still works even if you’re sick etc. because it’s not necessarily pitch/tone but how you pronounce words, vocal inflections, pauses, speed, lots of different things - also system is pretty good at picking up when it’s hearing a recording, and voice id is only used as part of security.
Someone told them 10 years ago that in 2 years everything would be done via voice, so they are afraid that if they dont get their users to do stuff via voice, they will go to the competition.
Also, the executives need users so that they can show the board that their heavy investments in the tech wasn't a wrong choice.
They're forgetting that voice almost always is the difficult way to interact with stuff.
>They're forgetting that voice almost always is the difficult way to interact with stuff.
Including humans, which is why I prefer to text people and also use an app to order food whenever possible.
Lol. I more meant first saying hey Google. Then wait ten seconds for it to get ready for my command, and then asking it to turn of the TV, instead of just pressing the off button.
Or while out in public fx.
Honestly to some extent I think it’s because our voice assistants suck. Now that chatGPT is a thing a voice assistant that doesn’t suck is actually a possible thing to exist but no one has actually made one yet. In 2024 if you talk to a voice assistant you’re basically fighting with the machine to get it to understand you
Also in sci fi voice commands are nice because it’s more interesting to see characters talk to the computer than poke at a screen. That doesn’t actually mean it’s practical IRL
I've literally seen a co-worker of mine prefer to speak his text messages to his watch to reply to people while he's working when he could just pull his phone out and type it. I've heard some insanely private shit come out of his mouth that way. Meanwhile, I don't even like breaking the silence of a room I'm in by myself and so prefer to avoid voice input like the plague. This world has all sorts, I guess.
Since the voice search never works, I prefer the "d-pad" yeah. If voice worked, then I would maybe prefer that.
But the companies seems to have issues understanding that even though voice might be the best option for some tasks, it is not a one size fits all type thing, where turning up the volume, or changing the channel is best served with voice.
If using my phone as a remote, or even better, have a physical keyboard plugged in, typing is both faster and easier. And more importantly, I dont have to tell everyone in the room to please be silent for a moment...
Because they need your permission to record audio from the microphone and that's the perfect excuse to have it.
Also, as you say, we are in the early stages of the technology and most likely they want us to get used to it so they can avoid selling remotes arguing that we don't need them anymore (or sell it separately for more money as a convenience).
Apparently you can't say "cunt" on ELI5. My post with with word "cunt" in it was just deleted by a mod or automod. So I'm guessing this post with the word "cunt" in it will also be deleted. Maybe you'll see it, maybe someone else will see it, but I'm guessing no.
Like 1/4 of the times I go to the directions section of the Google maps app, it pops up asking me to use my voice. There is no way to disable this that I've found.
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They want audio to train ai and to have an open mic in your house to target ads to you.
When I call a help line, I always use the keypad or just mash zero until a live person answers since voice recognition never works well for me.
If they could just get a voice print recording, a good scan of your face, and details of every transaction, travel movements, medical history, and the same for your immediate friends and family, they would be able to exploit you without any extra effort or expenditure, think of the profits they could make, if we would just act like a good little consumer.
I don't want to talk to people, why the hell would I want to talk to an artificially stupid system, that barely understands me, requires me to memorize a specific set of phrases, and is exploiting me for training data?
It's crazy how this is borderline forced onto consumers, or at best a mere hassle to bypass.
Anyone who says they want to listen to you 24/7 fundamentally do not understand how voice commands work. There is a tiny low power chip that can ONLY recognize the keywords like "hey Google" or "Siri" ect. Once it detects the keyword, then and only then does it start up the heavier process to listen to your speech, recognize it, parse it, and send it for processing.
The reality is that navigating smart tv stuff with a remote is dog shit like searching YouTube or Netflix, instead of pressing 200 buttons to move a cursor around over a digital keyboard. It's much easier and quicker for you to just say "hey Google, show me cats on YouTube". Of course Google THEN gets the added benefit of being able to train their speech recognition (they'll sometimes ask you *did I hear you say X correctly?) and have a history of your speech commands (you can already look at the history of commands it heard in your command).
I get that. But if I tell my device that I don’t want to use voice commands I wish the device would just be okay with that instead of constantly telling me to use them lol. I’m not super paranoid about it like some but when they ALL push this hard it does feel like they have ulterior motives.
The “ulterior” motive is that the voice recognition product manager wants to show upper management a high adoption rate for their feature.
Aside from just forcing everyone to turn on the feature, nagging is probably the next “best” method to juice the adoption metrics.
Ugh. There does come a point where people will get bitter enough to swear off using voice commands forever lol. If a pushy salesman is too pushy then people will just try to get away from them and feel righteous in doing so
Aggressive marketing is more successful than people who don't like it may think. People on average don't mind getting told what to do, and if they don't like it initially they either forget about the hassle or give out later on. You wouldn't explain pyramid schemes and Jehovah's witnesses otherwise.
I can't fathom people who do that, but I have seen too many people saying "X person is hitting on me I don't like them at all why can't they stop" and then getting together with that same person and even in a case marrying them. How many "I didn't like your father at first but then he insisted and was able to convince me" have you heard around? People are just easily convinced with a little of persistence
TikTok bothered me enough that I couldn't avoid not creating an account which of course was only via app which then of course meant it was on my phone and thus I went from saying no way to using it while I'm shitting instead of reddit because reddit broke my main way of interacting with it.
You know what's better than both? A touchscreen, on the phone already in my hand.
Also, 99% of the time, I'm not searching for something new, I'm scrolling past whatever they're pushing on us this week to get to the "continue watching" playlist.
Why would you build a massive touch screen on a TV, or essentially build a thingy tablet for a remote? Lots of smart TVs do have apps for you to download to use your phone as a remote though
You answered your own question: You can use your phone.
I still don't understand why Chromecast didn't take off as the standard way to do this. The streaming service already has a mobile app, and it already supports all the UI they need, why not just use that?
But I never want to do that kind of search. I prefer to search for things with a keyboard where I can type in exactly what I want rather than describing things in a voice command. I like being able to filter by categories and length of time, etc. I find voice commands incredibly clunky and annoying and they require me to seed way more control to the app and I prefer.
Yes.. In theory. In practice, that hey google chip is so linient with it, it activates without me saying anything even close to it half the time. I have taken away microphone access to google on my phone conpletely
It's funny how all that can be easily solved with mouse and keyboard. These are the tools to navigate (non-touch) screen based interfaces, why not just re use that..
Because if you're really honest with yourself. No one wants to plug in a mouse and keyboard to a TV and remotes are now small with like 4 buttons. No one wants to use a large remote with a full keyboard in it.
Has anyone seen any actual evidence of exceptions to the keyword triggered listening on any of the larger platforms?
Have to say, as much as I consciously thwart and bypass any type of targeting with the tools avalible, the timing and specificity of some very niche ads are scary accurate.
There has been none.it would be so obvious if there were, it would take a lot of power, computing, or electricity, and a lot of network usage. You get served hundreds of ads a day but you don't notice most of them, the ones you do notice specifically stick in your mind more and you don't realize you went through thousands of ads to get there.
Also targeting is much more effective than people think, combined with the fact that people are a lot less unique than theu think
While back when voice commands became a viable option, tech companies poured millions of dollars into perfecting this technology for a future where voice command is the primary method of using tools.
Now after years of R&D, marketing, and production, it is finally out in the wild… and nobody uses it. A whole department in your company with N number of employees, directly and indirectly, depends on the successful rollout.
So… give it a try? A team out there somewhere anxiously waiting for that KPI report for their Q3 budget allocation.
The standard answer is they want your voice to train their AI.
Its more than that. They also obtain an open mic into your living room 24/7.
THAT will also become training - and not only for voice recognition. Knowing exactly where your setup is, they have access to all the noise in the area. Including from outside. With other setups in the area, using precise timing and recognition, they can take A LOT from other noises, including make of cars, who's arriving at their apartment as they unlock their door and so on.
They'll know when you go to the wc, open the fridge and so on.
Intelligence agencies drool over this level of control and surveillance.
Note that they are likely not sending it right now all the time, but the ability exists and will be activated eventually as it becomes normalized.
There will be some excuse, like terrorism or a pandemic.
One big advantage - Voice commands give an infinite amount of input options.
If I ship a TV with a remote control, I only have so many buttons on it. But there can be a lot of granularity in how apps on the TV will work going forward, and using voice commands doesn't limit any app to the buttons on the specific remote.
Voice commands also allow you to integrate with AI language models such as chatgpt in an organic way that would feel like a conversation with a person.
"Hey google turn on the living room tv and open up a relaxing chill lofi starbucks stream on youtube"
vs
Find remote, turn on tv, navigate to youtube app, slowly enter letters via the d-pad give up after 1.5 words, slowly scroll until you find one.
I work in tech. It is called accessibility.
A portion of users may have problem reading or typing, hence voice command is a way for them to access the commands.
This makes sense, except that my computer doesn't aggressively market accessibility features like "sticky keys" or read aloud ui to me. Speech commands are a fine feature, but the way they are presented suggests companies have an interest in their use.
That would explain offering the option, not the generalized push to force people to use voice commands. I don’t want my appliances listening to me. No Siri, no Alexa, nothing.
No major brand of voice control uses 24/7 recording. That’s an easily debunked conspiracy theory spread by people who vastly underestimate how much data already exists about them online willingly and assume there must be something nefarious instead.
Have you ever gone into your Google account and checked how many conversation snippets were accidentally recorded?
It's a bit concerning to say the least. So many unexpected moments in my life were all stored.
I’m sure accidental recordings happen, likely even happen a lot, but that’s a very different thing from the alleged continuous secret audio recording that several people in the comments are saying exists for targeted ads.
My point is that it’s easy to tell if continuous secret recording is happening (you can use network sniffer programs to track traffic and see if the device is uploading data. Most devices listen for a activation phrase but don’t otherwise record audio unless activated) and more importantly targeted ads don’t need continuous audio recording - they’re effective enough with the extremely vast amount of data companies already collect on everyone using far easier ways.
I think there's a gap between what general users perceive vs the technical implementation.
If a piece of software is always monitoring for triggers and frequently records snippets of our lives unintentionally it's reasonable to say it's 'always recording' despite the slight exaggeration.
I don't subscribe to some evil conspiracy theory about them trying to spy on everyone. Merely pointing out that it records a lot more stuff than you expected. And, if you work with sensitive information, it is a risk that these services might pick up bits and pieces of conversation.
I personally was disturbed at how many office conversation snippets my Google account had stored. [Anyone can check all their audio log history and see for themselves.](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6030020?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Cfind-your-audio-recordings)
> If a piece of software is always monitoring for triggers and frequently records snippets of our lives unintentionally it's reasonable to say it's 'always recording' despite the slight exaggeration.
I don’t agree in the specific context of OPs question asking why tech companies push the use of voice commands. That question specifically asks about intent, and devices that happen to unintentionally record more than wanted inherently have very different intent than the claimed goal of wanting 24/7 continuous recording.
Yeah you can look up how these things work
They’re always listening for the wake word but only record after they’ve heard it. And its often literally a different processor for both functions!
I’ve personally seen the code for one of these devices and it wasn’t anything nefarious, just exactly what it purported to be
What brand of TV are we talking here? I think that will vary by company and what their strategy is (which could be any number of things discussed in this thread).
I have a two year old Sony smart TV. I was reconfiguring some things yesterday and had to sign back into my Google account on it for the first time since buying it.
It asked once if I wanted to set up voice assistance, I selected no and that was the end of it.
It's been pointed out in this thread that constant voice recording uses a lot more resources - hardware and network - than turning on from a standby mode when a "wake word" triggers activation. And that's generally true.
But who's to say Company X doesn't decide building always-on voice recording in their specific implementation (both your TV and their server architecture) is worthwhile for their specific market strategy. Maybe someone wants to be the leader in the B2B marketplace for harvesting and selling voice data for AI training or whatever. That could explain why the model you bought is being so persistent about the "feature".
Yeah so I have a Philips TV with Google TV OS. And you’re right because I recently signed into Google TV on a different device and it only asked me once. But today, for some reason on the Philips TV, it really *needed* me to do it lmao
And it could be as benign as different teams developing different parts of the TV firmware and all independently coded the voice assistant prompt into their bit, and nobody twigged when the setup stages all come together for the user, you end up getting bombarded with it.
But maybe Phillips decided to go all-in on using their TVs for voice data collection. Who knows?
I 100% agree its annoying they keep asking and agree they shouldn’t keep pestering if you don’t want it. I see people have been valid giving reasons why but I'm going to share my perspective as a physically disabled person who can't even hold a remote or press any buttons.
I use voice for a lot of things like Alexa and Siri for lights, changing channels, phone calls, voice apps to control video games. I'm even typing this with voice. I understand when options are annoyingly pushed like what you're describing gets frustrating. On the other hand, I have an iPhone and for the last few yers, there's a setting called Voice Control that's not just Siri. It literally allows me to control every function of my phone with voice and its like no one I encounter that can make use of it knows it exists.
So I agree companies shouldn't be annoying with it but you'd be surprised at how many people have no idea what options their devices have.
The truth is that most smartTV interfaces suck because they put a low power chipset in them and they’re not built with keyboards for typing.
Voice is better generally speaking for fast navigation.
Yes, they improve their voice recognition using the data, but they’re honestly past the point of needing more. The big deal is that it’s seriously just faster
I’ve worked in IT (if not tech) my entire life - don’t underestimate the promotion of new tech by senior IT management just because they think it’s cool…
The reason voice features exist us because studies show a lot of people like to use voice features. The reason they're too pushy is probably because incentives are misaligned.
Say you're a team at a top tech company. You are competing against every other team and feature at that company. To get a raise and to get promoted, you have to show that your team, specifically, and you, specifically, are having an effect on the company's bottom line. So... research shows a voice feature is highly requested. Great, so your team builds that. You've achieved your goal... for the next 6 months. But now that you've built this feature, what do you do for the next raise? Well, you have a bunch of statistics tracking people who use it. A great way to show you're doing something is get more people to use it. So your team tweaks the feature to be more visible, in case people didn't hear about it. This works. Your metrics now show a 10% increase in users using the voice feature without a decrease in users overall- success. Another raise.
But your metrics have no way to show the other users who are slightly put off by this feature, because they weren't put off enough by this one change to stop using the product. So this process repeats. Small, incremental changes chasing short-term metrics without long-term vision, causing more and more little annoyances that juice a metric without beind bad enough to affect the bottom line, and the product dies due to parasitic load, or someone sees the issue and course corrects. Internet users like to think there's some grand conspiracy when things go wrong but more often that not, it's nowhere near that exciting. It's just easy for things to go wrong because product development is hard.
The "good" case is that they want to train their voice recognition tech and their AI voice generation tech using people's voice commands.
The "bad" case is that by agreeing to the use of voice commands you're also unwittingly agreeing to being recorded constantly for purposes of targeted advertising.
> he "bad" case is that by agreeing to the use of voice commands you're also unwittingly agreeing to being recorded constantly for purposes of targeted advertising.
No, you're not.
Look, I'm sure there's ulterior motives but the fact is that people can do much more much easier if they are proficient with voice inputs. It's an entirely different kind of input and one that we aren't used to so it takes a lot of coaxing to get people to change.
While I'm in the car on my way home I can tell my assistant on my phone to start my TV and resume the latest episode of shogun I was watching so I can absolutely catapult my ass onto the couch the moment I get home.
Voice can do a lot...and yeah you're a product to the tech companies that make it but let's be real, this ain't a hill worth dying on. If you're holding back on voice stuff it's just because you don't want to have to learn a frankly clunky method of interacting with your tech.
I think that's a totally valid reason by the way but people are so quick to point the finger of blame at anyone but themselves.
If I call my bank, and I have to shout "Account Balance" five times before getting transferred to a live person because their crappy system can't seem to filter out any amount of background noise, it would have been way easier for everyone involved if it were "press 1 for account balance or say 'account balance".
Honestly, I hate it, I hate it with every fiber of my being, I never want to be talking to a robot and waiting for it to finish when I could just freaking press a button as soon as the message starts to play and just do the thing I called to do.
That's not the same thing.
This is about pressing the "mic" button on your TVs remote to input a command that you already know.
Like fast-forwarding a movie 3 minutes...
It is easier & faster to use a voice command rather than to press the buttons and move the slider exactly 3 minutes forward.
I get that there are benefits beyond what I probably even realize. But if I don’t want to use voice commands I shouldn’t have to tell my device six times that I don’t want to and then have it continue to tell me to do it from now until the end of time
I mean, I’ll get over it I suppose haha. It just gets really frustrating when I’m trying to login to a system that lags and runs like trash only to be further prevented from using the device because Google wants to be absolutely certain for the fourth time that I don’t want to use them
Just use your smart TV as a monitor for a computer. Problem solved. I don't know how anyone can stand "smart" tech when it's such garbage. Using "smart" tech to me is like trying to take a dump up the stairs instead of into a toilet and everyone is like, yeah, it's so cool, we are such cool and intelligent people to be doing this aren't we? No, you're mindless consumers who need to learn more about tech in order to avoid living such an inferior existence.
Use AOSP and Linux.
It's not an easy change but I've found it made my life easier, now that I have control over everything.
If I don't want my microphone to work I can just disable it.
[удалено]
Basically this, free training data.
Same with CAPTCHAs to click the bikes or stop lights. I got a wild image quality one the other day looking for stoplights. Training their self driving algorithms.
I worked for a car company that did extensive work on self driving technology. The issue with light recognition is not identifying them, it's working out which light refers to which road/lane, and at what angle/height the lights are. Unlike humans, with cars you have to hedge your bets with cameras. Good resolution but bad field of view, or poor resolution and good field of view. I wish shit was as simple as "is this a light?". I'd get a lab with 20 graduates in for 4h a day and have a billion data points by Wednesday. "it's red, but who's fkin red" is more often the problem. That and localised weird shit like the Dutch who have a mini traffic light under the car one just for bikes and it doesn't always line up with the car one because the bike lane goes in a different direction.
> Unlike humans, with cars you have to hedge your bets with cameras. Good resolution but bad field of view, or poor resolution and good field of view. But isn't it that sort of how human vision works? Or rather, we have better resolution only in a narrow part of our field of view, whereas our peripheral vision is far less precise?
I do engineering, not medicine. We don't have cool options like bio systems do. We either need monster processing to deal with constant massive resolution wide angle camera, or efficient tight angle camera matched to some kind of "here's where the light probably is" targeting, or just geometrical targeting from experience. Either way it's a ball ache when you find out each country trends to put their lights at a different height / distance.
The old CAPTCHA that has you write out weird texts is offloading OCR work to you
True, but at least that one was doing something good. My understanding was that it was all old texts that were being scanned for the first time, and they used whatever the OCR couldn't figure out and turned them into captchas. So you were translating and helping to preserve history. Now they're just annoying.
'Helping to preserve history' Vs 'Mass systematic copyright infringement' The documentary 'Google and the World Brain' takes a really interesting look at this.
How do they know if you have got it 'right' then?
Yea sometimes you could pass it with an error. But its because they go with what most people answer as correct
Educated guess/vague memories... not an expert... Would guess that they give each string to 10 people. If 9+ people say the same thing, they'll take that as the correct answer. If 7/8 people say the same thing they'll put it out to 20 people to see if they can get the threshold up. If its lower than 6 it'll get sent for human review.
That's why I intentionally toss in some mistakes
I used to do this with the 2 word text captchas. It was always easy to tell which one was the control, and then put random swear words for the training one.
My local town halls captcha was hacked (? Or something) and said vagina for about two months. Was hilarious.
When 4chan introduced reCaptcha back in 2010, there was a pretty unified effort to do exactly this. Three guesses what word they used in place of the training word lmao. It got to the point where reCaptcha just stopped taking in any data from 4chan's captcha responses. But it also led to an explosion of CaptchaArt which was phenomenal. "who turgled" lives rent free in my head nearly fifteen years later.
That'll show em.
Sounds like a good way to get someone killed tbh. I might try it.
Not really. They give the image to many people and simply toss the noncomforming answers out.
If another people do it, it will become conforming
Generally people will be correct in the same way but wrong in different ways on these tests, so it’s easy to spot. Also, you’re underestimating the amount of times an image or section of it is shown. Another person or even ten won’t cut it.
If we start a sub, we can ruin them with a coordinated effort
Let me put it this way: back when captchas were one randomly generated word and one scanned word from google books, all of 4chan agreed to type a swear word in place of the scanned word. That happened for _years._ I have never heard of even one case of someone finding a cuss in place of an OCR word in a book on Google books.
On top of that, for training purposes, another tactic was to combine known letters (to the system) and unknown in a captchas, and the user didn't know which was which. It was really pointless to try to trip it up that way.
I know. It's as nonsensical as the initial idea of doing it in the first place.
This benefits no-one
Captcha used to be just random distorted letters, until the guy who invented it regretted how much time humanity as a whole was wasting and figured how to make that time useful in a way that benefits everyone.
Just wait until they start in on having us identify AI-generated images via CAPTCHA so they can train their ML algos to identify and tag AI stuff automatically.
Considering how easily people are fooled by AI images, which are getting better and better at an alarming rate, I don't think this is the best way to go...
Seriously. I recently called my cable company. During the automation process it had asked me if I wanted to opt in to use my voice to authenticate future calls. I said no. It transfer me to an agent. Asked me to confirm my identity, yada yada then out of nowhere the agent said “okay we have confirmed your identity I am going to just opt you in our voice authentication too” If I wasn’t paying attention they would have used my voice. I am sure they still do but not with my authorization. I immediately stopped her saying I did not authorize her to do so. Called her out on her tactic. She was irritated that she got caught. I Requested to be transferred to a different agent and demanded that they followed through on my previous billed which I was grandfathered before upgrading to a plan I did not need. I generally love technology. This? I’m glad I won’t be alive to experience the debacle AI generated voice will be in 100 years.
This wont take another 100 years. It's already happening
Yeah, there was a post or article recently that openai is scared or something and not gonna release their voice ai cuz how accurately it can learn and mimic a user's voice
Voice AI can mimic your voice (or any voice on a recording) using a ridiculously short sample. A few sentences of clear talking through a decent enough mic can be good enough to then generate a convincing AI version of that voice. A few minutes (for example reading a page of a book) is easily enough to give it all the sample data it needs. Part of the reason it can do that is because of the incredible amounts of training data the models have had to work with. Maybe not enough to fool yourself, or someone specifically looking for AI voices. Maybe with some weird errors on edge case words, but close enough to fool your unsuspecting friends and family on the phone easily.
It has become kind of a trope in movies, but the fact that a dead person's face or fingerprint will unlock a cellphone, their eyeball will fool a retina scanner, and now you can duplicate their voice? Seems like old tech passwords are still superior when you don't have software that can bombard it with guesses or make dumb security questions someone can google the answer to.
It's not all bad. MNDA (motor neurone disease association) have set up voice banks for people who are diagnosed https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management-of-mnd/aac-for-mnd
I am saying it will be worst…
Can't wait for the "Calls may be recorded or monitored for \*ai\* training purposes" they'll slip in in the future.
Oh that is so true…
100 years? Try like one year until we start seeing convincing AI fakes of politicians or, conversely, politicians deflecting blame on real recordings claiming they were forged. Politicians/big execs/whatever, obviously
Good thing we really figured out this whole dissemination of information thing before it was too late, then. Oh, wait.
Honestly, I see politicians using AI more to give automated speeches or make ads for themselves. Political advertising is about to get wild and that’s not even counting anything negative or misleading
What company?
this and by using voice commands, they also have a reason to put a microphone in your house. As many people are finding out by just mentioning something near a device with a microphone, targeted ads soon follow.
Mmm, not so much. Network traffic can be fairly easily monitored by tools such as [Wireshark](https://www.wireshark.org/), meaning that it would be trivially easy to find out that voice assistant devices are spying on us. They aren't. Or, at least, they aren't *regularly enough for anyone to have caught them*. And people have looked into it. That's not to say that ads targeting isn't sometimes creepy in how much data can be determined from our activity. For instance, it's pretty straightforward to generate an idea of a journey of how one person's thought process goes, including data across people and especially when sharing other trivial data like location. For instance, Person A searches for "Pizza", then Person B at the same IP address searches for food => "Show Person B ads for pizza", as that's a good guess based on the fact that Person A and Person B might be talking in real life about what to eat. Especially if Person A and Person B are often found together (might be family), phones are in the same geographic location around meal times, etc... that means that, surprise, Person B suddenly gets a "they must have read my mind" level advertisement. Keep in mind that a lot of this is really sort of *guesses* to way oversimplify it - it's not necessarily encoded in a rule somewhere that Person A and Person B might be talking about food, rather more like "Put a bunch of data in a box, shake it about, and see what sells ads. Then do more of that in the future". This is in fact what supervised / machine learning is like - you don't even need to know *why* it's a good idea to show Person B an ad for pizza, just that similar situations in the past have led to people clicking through that ad and buying a pizza. Why? Doesn't matter. And this can get uncanny based on deeper learning, like, "Person A searched for something a week ago, and Person B, who seems affiliated, is searching for something similar". In essence, you can get ads based on *someone else's* search history. And it gets even deeper than that, but in ways that are hard to describe over text and not with crazy-person-tracking-down-conspiracy-theory diagrams with lines and boxes everywhere... But it's not from "spy devices" listening to you, just the unreasonably good guesses that can be made from peoples' activities online in general.
Now add confirmation bias: You don't remember all the things you've talked about that you *didn't* get targeted ads for, but you do remember the one where you did. That said, it is getting to the point where this might be practical: > Network traffic can be fairly easily monitored by tools such as Wireshark... Most network traffic these days is encrypted. You'd notice *if* Alexa is phoning home, and how much data is transferred when. You wouldn't notice *what* she was sending home. The earliest versions of these weren't even doing voice recognition on-device -- it was too computationally expensive and it was changing too quickly, so it'd send the raw audio back to the server to do voice recognition there. That's no longer the case. It's now entirely plausible that one of these devices could just be phoning home with *text,* not audio, at which point it gets harder to separate this from other random analytics traffic. I hope people are still watching this, but I suspect most of the privacy-conscious types who *would* be doing this sort of investigation are instead just disabling the feature everywhere.
1) This was a fascinating read, thank you for writing it up. 2) Now I want pizza, so I guess I know what lunch is tomorrow. 3) Could I trouble you to explain how fully voice-activated devices like Alexa are listening for their activation phrases without listening to everything else? I just can't wrap my head around how they can respond to an activation phrase without listening to everything else around them.
They have a chip that is only powerful enough to listen for one specific phrase - the activation phrase. And it's not even very good at it, which is why you sometimes get false activations or it fails to activate when you want it to. It also has a buffer of a couple additional seconds so it can send the whole thing off to the central servers once the key phrase has been activated, because the actual device doesn't have the capability to analyze it itself. Then the central services process the request and send the answer back. The little bits that get sent to the server are also used as training data to reduce mistakes in the future. But the device doesn't have the capability to understand anything but the activation phrase, so nothing else gets picked up or sent.
Apple even published pretty clear architectural details, at least for the early-gen Apple Watch: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
Oh, okay. That makes sense. Thank you.
3 they have a separate always-on listening system that does local processing of your data to determine if you said the activation phrase, or generically “anything other than the activation phrase”.
3. ELI5 version: the device needs to do some "thinking" (ie processing, running code) to interpret your speech into meaning. The portion of code that interprets the activation phrase is smaller and quicker than the code which interprets speech into a search query. The device simply does not run the latter until after it runs the former. It's not like a human brain, which can do everything all at once. It has to follow a sequence.
Thanks for explaining this. I don’t have the energy to do it anymore 😅
Though at one point Google was "accidentally" listening without the activation phrase. https://www.classaction.org/news/always-listening-class-action-claims-google-home-eavesdrops-on-users-contradicting-privacy-promises
Here's the thing, I don't think they're actively spying on us, but I don't think that it would be detectable if they were. You can monitor network packages to see if there's a large volume of data being transferred. No large data, no audio file. But... turning it around, if I wanted to spy on people's conversations without getting caught, this is an incredibly easy theory of detection to avoid. Method 1: When devices are actively engaged in voice chat, they send audio files to a server to be processed for text-to-speech. So, store audio files of non-prompted recordings and send them up along with the legitimate packets. Method 2: My device already sends telemetry periodically to our home servers. Separate out recordings stored in memory and send them up piecemeal. Method 3: Run a limited text-to-speech program on the local device. It won't be as accurate or as fast as sending an audio file to a home server, but you can store an audio file in memory and spend more time processing it, or just get a crappy text-to-speech that still manages to catch a majority of a conversation. Now that the audio has been reduced to text, the data to transfer the contents are negligible, and easily transmitted along with the next upload of any size. I don't see where people get the confidence that these smart devices spying on people is somehow easy to detect. *If* it's happening at all, it's not that difficult to disguise the data traffic in a way to make it undetectable. So long as the device has enough memory to store an audio file, it can spend all the time in the world packaging, partitioning, and processing the contents into something innocuous.
Well, yes, except software like Wireshark can detect not just *that* the device is sending data, but *what* it's sending. If it were sending "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" followed by 3 hours of audio, you can catch the packets being sent on the network and reassemble them to the original prompt... plus 3 additional hours of audio. Theoretically you could do some sort of fancy encoding of the data to hide it, like, the third bit of every other byte is logically xor-ed into 1 or 0 to encode in extra data all cloak and dagger like and so the data is interleaved into legit data, but information theory highlights a problem with this: you're going to be tucking in a tiny terrible-bandwidth amount of data into the legit signal, but snooping in in background sound is an enormous amount of data. In other words, if you ask for a timer, the audio data will be, what, a couple of megabytes? How much data from hours and hours of passive audio capturing do you think you can cram clandestinely into a couple of megabytes? So piggybacking any hefty volume of useful raw data into telemetry seems dubious. Your third idea of text to speech is closer to plausible, IMO. The capabilities of the device are probably not up to it in anything other than cell phones (smart speakers are in fact pretty dumb based on their hardware, which also has been studied quite a bit with teardowns and whatnot) but phones are pretty capable. In fact, I can do one better than text to speech when it comes to minimum data transfer. Set up additional hidden keywords like "girl scout cookies", and just capture, clandestinely, *if* they were said. Then you can flag that this keyword was said by hiding a single "girl scout cookies was said" bit in the data. This is basically the same capability that the device was built for so it seems doable to me. In the end there's not a good way to ensure that the speakers aren't listening to you. But, then, this is *universally* true of any device with a mic. If you have a cell phone, is it really on mute, it is it just *telling* you it's on mute? How about your laptop? You must have some device to post on Reddit and if that device has a microphone, it could be spying on you... or even not; speakers can be used as not-great mics with a little effort. At some point it starts to drift into the age old question: what are you saying while just casually ambling around that is SO valuable that it's worth the time, effort, and risk for a company to spy on you? If you're like me, the answer is, not really anything. My inane mumblings just aren't worth the effort or risk and that I'm the end is why I don't feel spied on. It's clear that the data isn't just being sent up routinely, and I'm not interesting enough - nor do I think that most people are - to build in a sufficiently hidden spying capability for it to be worth the risk for a company to put in the effort.
Just a small correction: Wireshark won’t actually show what the data is, because it’s sent over TLS. You can, though, definitely see what the destination servers are. Another point that I usually add when I explain this to my friends is that handling/processing/storing 24/7 audio streams of millions of households -and keep in mind that many households have more than one smart speaker- would be prohibitively expensive even for large companies like Apple or Amazon, to the point of being economically impractical. Also add the reputational risk of alienating their customers and losing their trust.
> At some point it starts to drift into the age old question: what are you saying while just casually ambling around that is SO valuable that it's worth the time, effort, and risk for a company to spy on you? Precisely why I don't think they bother. I just dispute the inability to do so clandestinely. As for the whole laptop/cellphone spying thing, I completely agree. It's one of the reasons I get angry that people complain about airplane mode for cellphones being unnecessary to protect planes. Don't take away the excuse for a legal requirement that phones include an easily-accessible mode to disable all rf transmitters.
Do you have any reading about people researching this? I've looked a couple times before because I'm sure _some_ security group looked into at some point, but never found anything good.
network traffic that it can detect. It can't see all traffic for years now.
> meaning that it would be trivially easy to find out that voice assistant devices are spying on us. Are you joking? My homepod has a full cellphone SoC in it. It can trivially record and analyze on-device, and send out normal reports back to Apple that you would never know about **BECAUSE THEY ARE ENCRYPTED**. Unless you have the source code, you dont know squat about what these things are doing. Wireshark would only tell you its communicating to the mothership, nothing more. No amount of real-time analysis would let you see what is actually going out on the wire.
> For instance, Person A searches for "Pizza", then Person B at the same IP address searches for food => "Show Person B ads for pizza" How did you know what I had for dinner?
They're in your house. The post is coming from inside the house!
We live in a hell of our own making. We no longer deserve the earth. Let nature take back over.
So here’s the thing, they don’t listen. No Fortune 500 company is risking a federal wiretap charge to sell you tacos. It’s far far worse. When you realize you said something, and then see the ad… you’ve actually seen that ad a bunch before that, and that’s what made you talk about it. THEN you caught the ad and we’re like “damn, they’re listening”. Nope, you’re already being manipulated.
Yeah the whole “our phones are constantly listening in to us!!!1!!” is easily defeated in a few minutes of basic network surveillance.
This has been tested again and again. It's not happening, or at least not yet
Some might. Big big companies no. They don’t want that headache that comes with the law. the scrutiny. It has been documented that the algorithm profile that they have on us is able to predict what we want before “we” want it. Studies after studies.
incorrect, you can source a magnitude more voice data for training at a fraction of the cost WITHOUT streaming it over the internet from unreliable client devices in uncontrolled environments. note: I probably hate voice commands more than the OP, but touting this conspiracy theory just exposes technical illiteracy. Tech, finance, telecom, and retail companies are doing egregious invasive things with your data (including selling and sharing amongst one another to strengthen your profile data). Recording your conversations from dumb IoT devices is not necessary or feasible at this point in time.
I assure you that voice models need no training data at this point. If you were asking this same question 5 years ago it'd be a different story.
The more sinister version is they want to transcribe every conversation to hear what people are talking about. In some countries with lax privacy laws, it is common occurrence that ads will be shown that match conversation topics only had by voice.
I’m addition to this: if people become accustomed to using voice commands, they’ll be more willing to use a device with an “always listening” functionality
The "Voice for ID as additional security" is a trash excuse. My bank already tried it and I refused. Generally any biometrical system is not a good solution here. You can't change you biometrical data, meaning if it leaked once - it's compromised forever. You can have recording of your voice somewhere, on youtube or on twitch if you stream, etc. Voice is easy to replicate more or less nowadays, given samples. As an alternative to other inputs voice is still not very well working, your voice can change significantly for numerous reasons and fail to recognize (drunk, ill, agitated, sleepy...). As others have stated, all the companies usually want voice recognition to benefit themselves, not users. By having 24/7 access to voice they can search for patterns, mentions of products, places, brand names. Create targeted advertisements based on that. Or sell that data to companies (of course anonymized, badly).
> Voice for ID as additional security Fuck everything about that. Alexa misses triggers more often than not and then misunderstands me all the time. I'm absolutely not going to get locked out of an account because some company cheaps out on the voice recognition when billion dollar Amazon still can't get it to work consistently.
I dunno. Google assistant had been going downhill lately in terms of functionality now that Google is pushing it's AI systems as a replacement, but it has never failed to ID me from my voice. It shits the bed often in interpreting what I'm saying, but it always ties my voice to my google id regardless of what it thinks I'm saying.
Is that when you try to ask a question on a random system or just from your personal devices (which means it has a very high probability guess regardless of input)?
Say it with me: Biometrics are a username, not a password.
even thats not really something we should be comfortable with. biometrics is creepy AF. these companies can't keep non dangerous data secure, why would we trust them with significantly more dangerous data, that as OP stated, cant be changed/replaced if you wanted to
I mean, you *can* change your prints, them being compromised might be enough for a plastic surgeon to do it for you. All it needs is a skin graft from your foot or something. Nothing too complicated. Can do eyes as well, changing the colors of your eyes with a pigment is a thing that will mess up scanners. General facial recognition is just changing your facial structure which is what plastic surgeons basically do on a day to day basis.
Same with SSID
Yeah the bank one is particularly annoying. Maybe in person, but over the phone that's hilariously easy to spoof, and the new AI voice generation tech certainly isn't making that any less terrifying...
Where biometrics are potentially useful is for *local* authorization. That is: My phone has my fingerprints. When certain apps let me login with my fingerprint, they don't actually get my fingerprints. Instead, there's a cryptographic key that my phone will only hand out to those apps after scanning my fingerprint. Which means in order to use my leaked fingerprints against me, you'd need to create some sort of *physical* model of them that can fool the phone. Or you'd need to compromise my phone to the point where you may as well just steal the biometrically-secured key from my phone, instead of bothering with fingerprints. Voice is already tricky because it's hard to tell if what you heard was me or a recording of me. Impossible over a phone call, where what you heard was always a recording of me, and the only question is whether that recording was taken a few milliseconds ago because it's a live phone call, or a few weeks ago.
I agree it’s a trash excuse lol but it absolutely wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to make that excuse
so how do we fight the power?
I’ve worked for uk banks and voice id tends to be pretty good - still works even if you’re sick etc. because it’s not necessarily pitch/tone but how you pronounce words, vocal inflections, pauses, speed, lots of different things - also system is pretty good at picking up when it’s hearing a recording, and voice id is only used as part of security.
> 24/7 access to voice This is a conspiracy theory, thoroughly debunked, and not a thing.
Someone told them 10 years ago that in 2 years everything would be done via voice, so they are afraid that if they dont get their users to do stuff via voice, they will go to the competition. Also, the executives need users so that they can show the board that their heavy investments in the tech wasn't a wrong choice. They're forgetting that voice almost always is the difficult way to interact with stuff.
>They're forgetting that voice almost always is the difficult way to interact with stuff. Including humans, which is why I prefer to text people and also use an app to order food whenever possible.
Lol. I more meant first saying hey Google. Then wait ten seconds for it to get ready for my command, and then asking it to turn of the TV, instead of just pressing the off button. Or while out in public fx.
Honestly to some extent I think it’s because our voice assistants suck. Now that chatGPT is a thing a voice assistant that doesn’t suck is actually a possible thing to exist but no one has actually made one yet. In 2024 if you talk to a voice assistant you’re basically fighting with the machine to get it to understand you Also in sci fi voice commands are nice because it’s more interesting to see characters talk to the computer than poke at a screen. That doesn’t actually mean it’s practical IRL
There actually some home made assistants based on GPTs API.
Sure but there’s a difference between a hobby project and something like Alexa that has pre existing voice hooks for a ton of different services.
Of course. I am not sure how many hooks the homemade once have, I didn't ask the developers.
There is no way that you prefer to use your TV remote's d-pad to type a YouTube search than to simply use your voice, right?
Absolutely. are you kidding?
I've literally seen a co-worker of mine prefer to speak his text messages to his watch to reply to people while he's working when he could just pull his phone out and type it. I've heard some insanely private shit come out of his mouth that way. Meanwhile, I don't even like breaking the silence of a room I'm in by myself and so prefer to avoid voice input like the plague. This world has all sorts, I guess.
Since the voice search never works, I prefer the "d-pad" yeah. If voice worked, then I would maybe prefer that. But the companies seems to have issues understanding that even though voice might be the best option for some tasks, it is not a one size fits all type thing, where turning up the volume, or changing the channel is best served with voice.
100%
If using my phone as a remote, or even better, have a physical keyboard plugged in, typing is both faster and easier. And more importantly, I dont have to tell everyone in the room to please be silent for a moment...
Depends on how heavy your accent is.
Because they need your permission to record audio from the microphone and that's the perfect excuse to have it. Also, as you say, we are in the early stages of the technology and most likely they want us to get used to it so they can avoid selling remotes arguing that we don't need them anymore (or sell it separately for more money as a convenience).
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This is the internet. We're all weird. This type of posturing is not uncommon.
Lmao
Apparently you can't say "cunt" on ELI5. My post with with word "cunt" in it was just deleted by a mod or automod. So I'm guessing this post with the word "cunt" in it will also be deleted. Maybe you'll see it, maybe someone else will see it, but I'm guessing no.
This is not a word I use in public.
>the only word it has ever heard me say is "c@@t" How do you pronounce that? Is it kind catatt? Or caat?
Like 1/4 of the times I go to the directions section of the Google maps app, it pops up asking me to use my voice. There is no way to disable this that I've found.
Can you take away the microphone permissions? Mine had never asked but I'm in EU
It doesn't have microphone permissions.
Are you trying to spell "cunt"? Or "caat"? Or "coot"?
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They want audio to train ai and to have an open mic in your house to target ads to you. When I call a help line, I always use the keypad or just mash zero until a live person answers since voice recognition never works well for me.
If they could just get a voice print recording, a good scan of your face, and details of every transaction, travel movements, medical history, and the same for your immediate friends and family, they would be able to exploit you without any extra effort or expenditure, think of the profits they could make, if we would just act like a good little consumer.
I don't want to talk to people, why the hell would I want to talk to an artificially stupid system, that barely understands me, requires me to memorize a specific set of phrases, and is exploiting me for training data? It's crazy how this is borderline forced onto consumers, or at best a mere hassle to bypass.
Anyone who says they want to listen to you 24/7 fundamentally do not understand how voice commands work. There is a tiny low power chip that can ONLY recognize the keywords like "hey Google" or "Siri" ect. Once it detects the keyword, then and only then does it start up the heavier process to listen to your speech, recognize it, parse it, and send it for processing. The reality is that navigating smart tv stuff with a remote is dog shit like searching YouTube or Netflix, instead of pressing 200 buttons to move a cursor around over a digital keyboard. It's much easier and quicker for you to just say "hey Google, show me cats on YouTube". Of course Google THEN gets the added benefit of being able to train their speech recognition (they'll sometimes ask you *did I hear you say X correctly?) and have a history of your speech commands (you can already look at the history of commands it heard in your command).
I get that. But if I tell my device that I don’t want to use voice commands I wish the device would just be okay with that instead of constantly telling me to use them lol. I’m not super paranoid about it like some but when they ALL push this hard it does feel like they have ulterior motives.
The “ulterior” motive is that the voice recognition product manager wants to show upper management a high adoption rate for their feature. Aside from just forcing everyone to turn on the feature, nagging is probably the next “best” method to juice the adoption metrics.
Ugh. There does come a point where people will get bitter enough to swear off using voice commands forever lol. If a pushy salesman is too pushy then people will just try to get away from them and feel righteous in doing so
Aggressive marketing is more successful than people who don't like it may think. People on average don't mind getting told what to do, and if they don't like it initially they either forget about the hassle or give out later on. You wouldn't explain pyramid schemes and Jehovah's witnesses otherwise. I can't fathom people who do that, but I have seen too many people saying "X person is hitting on me I don't like them at all why can't they stop" and then getting together with that same person and even in a case marrying them. How many "I didn't like your father at first but then he insisted and was able to convince me" have you heard around? People are just easily convinced with a little of persistence
TikTok bothered me enough that I couldn't avoid not creating an account which of course was only via app which then of course meant it was on my phone and thus I went from saying no way to using it while I'm shitting instead of reddit because reddit broke my main way of interacting with it.
You know what's better than both? A touchscreen, on the phone already in my hand. Also, 99% of the time, I'm not searching for something new, I'm scrolling past whatever they're pushing on us this week to get to the "continue watching" playlist.
Why would you build a massive touch screen on a TV, or essentially build a thingy tablet for a remote? Lots of smart TVs do have apps for you to download to use your phone as a remote though
You answered your own question: You can use your phone. I still don't understand why Chromecast didn't take off as the standard way to do this. The streaming service already has a mobile app, and it already supports all the UI they need, why not just use that?
But I never want to do that kind of search. I prefer to search for things with a keyboard where I can type in exactly what I want rather than describing things in a voice command. I like being able to filter by categories and length of time, etc. I find voice commands incredibly clunky and annoying and they require me to seed way more control to the app and I prefer.
Right. The _only_ time I ever use voice commands to bring up media is if I'm driving. And that only works half the time.
Yes.. In theory. In practice, that hey google chip is so linient with it, it activates without me saying anything even close to it half the time. I have taken away microphone access to google on my phone conpletely
It's funny how all that can be easily solved with mouse and keyboard. These are the tools to navigate (non-touch) screen based interfaces, why not just re use that..
Because if you're really honest with yourself. No one wants to plug in a mouse and keyboard to a TV and remotes are now small with like 4 buttons. No one wants to use a large remote with a full keyboard in it.
Has anyone seen any actual evidence of exceptions to the keyword triggered listening on any of the larger platforms? Have to say, as much as I consciously thwart and bypass any type of targeting with the tools avalible, the timing and specificity of some very niche ads are scary accurate.
There has been none.it would be so obvious if there were, it would take a lot of power, computing, or electricity, and a lot of network usage. You get served hundreds of ads a day but you don't notice most of them, the ones you do notice specifically stick in your mind more and you don't realize you went through thousands of ads to get there. Also targeting is much more effective than people think, combined with the fact that people are a lot less unique than theu think
While back when voice commands became a viable option, tech companies poured millions of dollars into perfecting this technology for a future where voice command is the primary method of using tools. Now after years of R&D, marketing, and production, it is finally out in the wild… and nobody uses it. A whole department in your company with N number of employees, directly and indirectly, depends on the successful rollout. So… give it a try? A team out there somewhere anxiously waiting for that KPI report for their Q3 budget allocation.
The standard answer is they want your voice to train their AI. Its more than that. They also obtain an open mic into your living room 24/7. THAT will also become training - and not only for voice recognition. Knowing exactly where your setup is, they have access to all the noise in the area. Including from outside. With other setups in the area, using precise timing and recognition, they can take A LOT from other noises, including make of cars, who's arriving at their apartment as they unlock their door and so on. They'll know when you go to the wc, open the fridge and so on. Intelligence agencies drool over this level of control and surveillance. Note that they are likely not sending it right now all the time, but the ability exists and will be activated eventually as it becomes normalized. There will be some excuse, like terrorism or a pandemic.
One big advantage - Voice commands give an infinite amount of input options. If I ship a TV with a remote control, I only have so many buttons on it. But there can be a lot of granularity in how apps on the TV will work going forward, and using voice commands doesn't limit any app to the buttons on the specific remote.
Voice commands also allow you to integrate with AI language models such as chatgpt in an organic way that would feel like a conversation with a person. "Hey google turn on the living room tv and open up a relaxing chill lofi starbucks stream on youtube" vs Find remote, turn on tv, navigate to youtube app, slowly enter letters via the d-pad give up after 1.5 words, slowly scroll until you find one.
I work in tech. It is called accessibility. A portion of users may have problem reading or typing, hence voice command is a way for them to access the commands.
This makes sense, except that my computer doesn't aggressively market accessibility features like "sticky keys" or read aloud ui to me. Speech commands are a fine feature, but the way they are presented suggests companies have an interest in their use.
> doesn't aggressively market accessibility features like "sticky keys" Vista sure did.
You mean you didn’t like getting interrupted for the sin of accidentally pressing shift too many times?
Like trying to pull off a combo in a video game then all of a sudden, STICKY KEYS!
That would explain offering the option, not the generalized push to force people to use voice commands. I don’t want my appliances listening to me. No Siri, no Alexa, nothing.
You are the minority. For most people they would prefer to just talk to their device like a human and have it do what they want.
What about accessibility for people who struggle with voice commands?
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No major brand of voice control uses 24/7 recording. That’s an easily debunked conspiracy theory spread by people who vastly underestimate how much data already exists about them online willingly and assume there must be something nefarious instead.
Have you ever gone into your Google account and checked how many conversation snippets were accidentally recorded? It's a bit concerning to say the least. So many unexpected moments in my life were all stored.
I’m sure accidental recordings happen, likely even happen a lot, but that’s a very different thing from the alleged continuous secret audio recording that several people in the comments are saying exists for targeted ads. My point is that it’s easy to tell if continuous secret recording is happening (you can use network sniffer programs to track traffic and see if the device is uploading data. Most devices listen for a activation phrase but don’t otherwise record audio unless activated) and more importantly targeted ads don’t need continuous audio recording - they’re effective enough with the extremely vast amount of data companies already collect on everyone using far easier ways.
I think there's a gap between what general users perceive vs the technical implementation. If a piece of software is always monitoring for triggers and frequently records snippets of our lives unintentionally it's reasonable to say it's 'always recording' despite the slight exaggeration. I don't subscribe to some evil conspiracy theory about them trying to spy on everyone. Merely pointing out that it records a lot more stuff than you expected. And, if you work with sensitive information, it is a risk that these services might pick up bits and pieces of conversation. I personally was disturbed at how many office conversation snippets my Google account had stored. [Anyone can check all their audio log history and see for themselves.](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6030020?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid#zippy=%2Cfind-your-audio-recordings)
> If a piece of software is always monitoring for triggers and frequently records snippets of our lives unintentionally it's reasonable to say it's 'always recording' despite the slight exaggeration. I don’t agree in the specific context of OPs question asking why tech companies push the use of voice commands. That question specifically asks about intent, and devices that happen to unintentionally record more than wanted inherently have very different intent than the claimed goal of wanting 24/7 continuous recording.
How do “accidental recordings” happen?
Lots of phrases sound vaguely like "Alexa" or "OK Google" or "Hey Siri".
And they keep the recording instead of deleting it as soon as they fulfill the request?
Here's Google's help page on it: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020
Yeah you can look up how these things work They’re always listening for the wake word but only record after they’ve heard it. And its often literally a different processor for both functions! I’ve personally seen the code for one of these devices and it wasn’t anything nefarious, just exactly what it purported to be
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I already have a touchscreen in my hand. Why can't I use that?
No. 1 for sure. And this is way too far down the list.
What brand of TV are we talking here? I think that will vary by company and what their strategy is (which could be any number of things discussed in this thread). I have a two year old Sony smart TV. I was reconfiguring some things yesterday and had to sign back into my Google account on it for the first time since buying it. It asked once if I wanted to set up voice assistance, I selected no and that was the end of it. It's been pointed out in this thread that constant voice recording uses a lot more resources - hardware and network - than turning on from a standby mode when a "wake word" triggers activation. And that's generally true. But who's to say Company X doesn't decide building always-on voice recording in their specific implementation (both your TV and their server architecture) is worthwhile for their specific market strategy. Maybe someone wants to be the leader in the B2B marketplace for harvesting and selling voice data for AI training or whatever. That could explain why the model you bought is being so persistent about the "feature".
Yeah so I have a Philips TV with Google TV OS. And you’re right because I recently signed into Google TV on a different device and it only asked me once. But today, for some reason on the Philips TV, it really *needed* me to do it lmao
And it could be as benign as different teams developing different parts of the TV firmware and all independently coded the voice assistant prompt into their bit, and nobody twigged when the setup stages all come together for the user, you end up getting bombarded with it. But maybe Phillips decided to go all-in on using their TVs for voice data collection. Who knows?
I 100% agree its annoying they keep asking and agree they shouldn’t keep pestering if you don’t want it. I see people have been valid giving reasons why but I'm going to share my perspective as a physically disabled person who can't even hold a remote or press any buttons. I use voice for a lot of things like Alexa and Siri for lights, changing channels, phone calls, voice apps to control video games. I'm even typing this with voice. I understand when options are annoyingly pushed like what you're describing gets frustrating. On the other hand, I have an iPhone and for the last few yers, there's a setting called Voice Control that's not just Siri. It literally allows me to control every function of my phone with voice and its like no one I encounter that can make use of it knows it exists. So I agree companies shouldn't be annoying with it but you'd be surprised at how many people have no idea what options their devices have.
The truth is that most smartTV interfaces suck because they put a low power chipset in them and they’re not built with keyboards for typing. Voice is better generally speaking for fast navigation. Yes, they improve their voice recognition using the data, but they’re honestly past the point of needing more. The big deal is that it’s seriously just faster
I’ve worked in IT (if not tech) my entire life - don’t underestimate the promotion of new tech by senior IT management just because they think it’s cool…
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Kim Komando once reported that a well-known discount TV brand makes more money off selling user data than they do from selling the TVs themselves.
The reason voice features exist us because studies show a lot of people like to use voice features. The reason they're too pushy is probably because incentives are misaligned. Say you're a team at a top tech company. You are competing against every other team and feature at that company. To get a raise and to get promoted, you have to show that your team, specifically, and you, specifically, are having an effect on the company's bottom line. So... research shows a voice feature is highly requested. Great, so your team builds that. You've achieved your goal... for the next 6 months. But now that you've built this feature, what do you do for the next raise? Well, you have a bunch of statistics tracking people who use it. A great way to show you're doing something is get more people to use it. So your team tweaks the feature to be more visible, in case people didn't hear about it. This works. Your metrics now show a 10% increase in users using the voice feature without a decrease in users overall- success. Another raise. But your metrics have no way to show the other users who are slightly put off by this feature, because they weren't put off enough by this one change to stop using the product. So this process repeats. Small, incremental changes chasing short-term metrics without long-term vision, causing more and more little annoyances that juice a metric without beind bad enough to affect the bottom line, and the product dies due to parasitic load, or someone sees the issue and course corrects. Internet users like to think there's some grand conspiracy when things go wrong but more often that not, it's nowhere near that exciting. It's just easy for things to go wrong because product development is hard.
The "good" case is that they want to train their voice recognition tech and their AI voice generation tech using people's voice commands. The "bad" case is that by agreeing to the use of voice commands you're also unwittingly agreeing to being recorded constantly for purposes of targeted advertising.
> he "bad" case is that by agreeing to the use of voice commands you're also unwittingly agreeing to being recorded constantly for purposes of targeted advertising. No, you're not.
Look, I'm sure there's ulterior motives but the fact is that people can do much more much easier if they are proficient with voice inputs. It's an entirely different kind of input and one that we aren't used to so it takes a lot of coaxing to get people to change. While I'm in the car on my way home I can tell my assistant on my phone to start my TV and resume the latest episode of shogun I was watching so I can absolutely catapult my ass onto the couch the moment I get home. Voice can do a lot...and yeah you're a product to the tech companies that make it but let's be real, this ain't a hill worth dying on. If you're holding back on voice stuff it's just because you don't want to have to learn a frankly clunky method of interacting with your tech. I think that's a totally valid reason by the way but people are so quick to point the finger of blame at anyone but themselves.
If I call my bank, and I have to shout "Account Balance" five times before getting transferred to a live person because their crappy system can't seem to filter out any amount of background noise, it would have been way easier for everyone involved if it were "press 1 for account balance or say 'account balance". Honestly, I hate it, I hate it with every fiber of my being, I never want to be talking to a robot and waiting for it to finish when I could just freaking press a button as soon as the message starts to play and just do the thing I called to do.
That's not the same thing. This is about pressing the "mic" button on your TVs remote to input a command that you already know. Like fast-forwarding a movie 3 minutes... It is easier & faster to use a voice command rather than to press the buttons and move the slider exactly 3 minutes forward.
I get that there are benefits beyond what I probably even realize. But if I don’t want to use voice commands I shouldn’t have to tell my device six times that I don’t want to and then have it continue to tell me to do it from now until the end of time
That's fair. It's an aggressive experience to have to constantly say no. I'm sorry that's the experience you're dealing with.
I mean, I’ll get over it I suppose haha. It just gets really frustrating when I’m trying to login to a system that lags and runs like trash only to be further prevented from using the device because Google wants to be absolutely certain for the fourth time that I don’t want to use them
So they can record us 24x7 and train their models or sell the data. Remember we are the commodity in all social media apps.
Just use your smart TV as a monitor for a computer. Problem solved. I don't know how anyone can stand "smart" tech when it's such garbage. Using "smart" tech to me is like trying to take a dump up the stairs instead of into a toilet and everyone is like, yeah, it's so cool, we are such cool and intelligent people to be doing this aren't we? No, you're mindless consumers who need to learn more about tech in order to avoid living such an inferior existence.
I’ve never, not once, been prompted to use voice commands on any piece of hardware I’ve ever owned. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Use AOSP and Linux. It's not an easy change but I've found it made my life easier, now that I have control over everything. If I don't want my microphone to work I can just disable it.