Not only will the tech giant's little assistant be listening to you, it'll sometimes use those conversations to train the company's newest product.

I’m never putting one of these in my home.

@lntl@lemmy.ml
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151Y

haven’t we all known this since product launch ?

Spliffman1
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101Y

No wonder she’s been getting more stupid recently

mechoman444
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31Y

An always on microphone connected to a company that is mostly known to exploit their customers and employees! Say it ain’t so!

sebinspace
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31Y

And Pokémon Go uses your location for its gameplay

That’s kind of how this shit works…

Orionza
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41Y

We always knew that. What they don’t tell you is your phone is also secretly listening. “Ok Google” <- turn that thing off too

The Snark Urge
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201Y

I will be the last person to not have a smart home. There will be a banner over the doorway: “Welcome to Stupid House”.

There will be a small cover charge.

@Patius@lemmy.world
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31Y

When skynet comes online, I’ll die quickly, being mopped to death. You’ll have to struggle in the post apocalyptic hellscape where humans fight robots with A-10s for some reason.

Flying Squid
creator
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91Y

I’m with you. I hate how they expect me to control everything from my phone or with voice commands. I’m fine walking to a light switch or walking to the thermostat.

@orclev@lemmy.world
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131Y

There’s a middle ground as well. I refuse to put Alexa or OK Google or whatever on any of my stuff, but I run home-assistant with zigbee smart devices. My entire setup runs completely cut off from the internet. I could in theory even air gap it, although that’s a little overkill. It’s a “smart” house, but one I’m 100% in control of.

The Snark Urge
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Is that self hosted? I’d just about fuck with a FOSS self hosted smart home setup, but even then I could barely be arsed

@orclev@lemmy.world
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21Y

Yep, I run mine on an ODroid XU4, but you can run it on just about anything including a docker container on a generic Linux install.

@AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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61Y

Yes. You can host it on a pi if you want

@Cihta@lemmy.world
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21Y

I’ll get a lot of hate for this but when you say pi you mean pi4. I kept seeing this HA on lemmy and tried it on a pi2. I don’t know if it worked or not, it’s a very bloated piece of software. After an hour of waiting I installed docker and the HA instance on my main server (which is ancient) in under a minute.

It’s cool and all but my feit dimmers require some pcb work and flashing to be compatible so verify what devices you have before you hop in.

I used to have an automated building running on a bare 386 and a floppy drive. Hate on me all you want but sending simple commands like turn device on shouldn’t require a giant software package but otherwise HA is neat, just a lot of overhead i can’t exactly justify.

Worth trying out though.

I think reflow stole a lot of their code.

@AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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No hate from me.

Just about every project I’ve started with a pi has ended up working out a lot better as a vm on an x86 host. But lots of people seem to love them.

@Cihta@lemmy.world
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21Y

To be fair It has its uses i suppose. I’ve had one running pihole since the original pi came out. Used PI2s in the past for OSMC and, even better, ambilight.

I think now a cheap android TV box you can flash is probably better for a simple less than 5watt device.

Besides the HA test I’ve been trying to use one to be an openvpn TAP interface but it’s been a fight and i think you just convinced me to do it in another docker instance on the server and save myself some headaches.

The Snark Urge
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41Y

That’s badass. I’ve got one lying around actually.

@orclev@lemmy.world
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31Y

Be careful running it in a Pi because it’s a little heavy for that depending on how you configure it. A Pi model 4 is probably OK, but you wouldn’t want to run it on a model 3 or something even older, and you’re going to want to use one with at least 4GB of RAM.

The Snark Urge
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31Y

Ah shit, the raspberry I’ve got is old as hell. Thanks for the heads up.

I’m using z-wave stuff but similar setup. Home Assistant does reach out to the cloud for some things like weather forecast and Google calendar but otherwise it will operate 100% without internet if needed. I also have cameras that while they aren’t air-gappend they are blocked from Internet access and can only talk to the NVR.

Yeah, that’s kinda the point. They literally tell you that your voice interactions are used to improve the service.

@Scrof@sopuli.xyz
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431Y

Would’ve been newsworthy if it wasn’t the case

@kicksystem@lemmy.world
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41Y

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but maybe you could tell me why?

@naut@lemmy.ml
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01Y

it is a link to another post with few, but not limited to, reasons

@optissima@lemmy.world
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11Y

it is only hard if you want it to be hard

WTF is this bullshit. Not everyone is equally capable and this reductionist shit is hurting those that do need the help.

@naut@lemmy.ml
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3
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well the title says “as long as you can”, not sure what is the issue here, just do whatever you can, don’t fold if you don’t need to, that’s it

Sagrotan
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111Y

Noooo reaaally?

@Rognaut@lemmy.world
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21Y

Yeah, I realized these things are terrible about a year ago. So, I hacked them into computer speakers using some cheap amps and a 12 volt power supply.

@auf@lemmy.ml
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deleted by creator

TheLowestStone
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21Y

Obviously. How else would it hear you say, “Alexa?”

What about just a firestick? That uses Alexa

@EnderMB@lemmy.world
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31Y

I’d love a citation on this, outside of wakeword usage (a local device waiting for "Alexa* to begin recording).

Source: their ass.

Alexa devices use an onboard DSP to detect the wakeword and maintain a rolling audio buffer. On a positive match, the DSP wakes the main CPU which combines the saved buffer and any following speech and uploads it to the cloud where Alexa lives so she can try to figure out what you meant.

No audio is uploaded without being triggered by a wakeword. Also, the “mute” button physically cuts power to the mic, and the indicator LED is hardwired to the power rail as a failsafe indicator.

@EnderMB@lemmy.world
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11Y

Oh, I know. For reference, I work at Amazon, so always interested in where these stories come from 😂

That was more for everyone else’s edification. I worked on a plethora of Amazon devices over the course of a decade.

Not going to get much out of me then, most of what Alexander hears is what’s on the TV or music I listen to. If they want to train alexa on that, their fucked

maegul (he/they)
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31Y

So who thinks this conversation here on lemmy isn’t being used to train an AI? Maybe not right now but later?

Sure the relatively small size of lemmy means it might not be scooped up and trained on. But the point still stands. All that is publicly online is food for the big-corp AI builders. And while Alexa invading your home privacy is obviously a shitty thing, I’m not sure we’ve all thought through the new relationship between us, the internet and the big AIs.

Spliffman1
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31Y

Stop usieng such grammar gud, and ur spellang soe good you be teach to them 2 good

Rentlar
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41Y

Well I know I have no expectation of privacy here, but I’d rather open source LLMs train on my words along with proprietary ones, than some company hoarding information and selling it to each other.

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