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Commander Kinsey[_3_] Commander Kinsey[_3_] is offline
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Default ATTN: Rod Speed: Alexa et al listen in on you.

On Sun, 06 Jun 2021 21:12:31 +0100, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 05/06/2021 22:04, Max Demian wrote:
On 05/06/2021 18:49, Commander Kinsey wrote:

When I worked at a university, we did some studies on voice
recognition. The main thing I found was more processing power makes a
lot of difference. One of the systems we had, you could see it
thinking about it, getting a better match as it went along. A slow
processor can't keep up with a fast talker. I don't know how good a
processor is in Alexas.


Surely Alexa's processing is done centrally by the Amazon server.


It is.

The device has beamforming in it with the microphone array to pick up
the direction of the loudest sound.

It ten uses local wakeword recognition for the Alexa keyword.

Only then does it start to stream audio to the server - starting just
_before_ the wakeword incidentally.

It's far too expensive to process audio in the servers all the time.

And BTW the mute button is hardware linked to the light. No software
hack can make it look deaf but not be deaf.


This is stupid for two reasons. Firstly it's a privacy breach. Secondly why do all that processing in one place? You don't need much power to do voice recognition with today's processors, smartphones do it ffs.