The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

I think the audience here might be ok with '"enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory' hardware.

" Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”? A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ... "

They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...

Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"

Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?

For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D

How many hours did you spend on this? I want to do it, but I don’t have much time.

What do you mean color version?

As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!

Timers works fine.

Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.

There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.

OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].

[0] https://github.com/music-assistant/voice-support

I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..

This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...

It has some of those features. I think I’d attach speakers to the HA Voice you can use them that way but the built-in speaker will not cut it (think gen1 Echo).

They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.

Are those features worth having a wiretap in your entire home?

Hardware mute until they switch the speaker output pins to input mode and use the speaker itself as a microphone.

Is it really smart if you've removed the ability for it to respond to voice commands ?

> physically scraped out the MEMS microphones.

I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?

I like this approach.

But can you safely do this with multi room devices?

I feel you on prioritizing moral work! It took me a long time in my career to finally be able to make that choice (versus taking the first job I could find). I had an extremely moral open source robotics job for 5.5 years and then had to leave and take a less moral but still I think positively moral startup job. I think it’s okay to prioritize your personal financial needs sometimes. In the long term you won’t do the immoral stuff that long if this is how you think - so your own will provides a check to make sure you won’t do it too long.

It's not possible to work for a moral company because it's the government that's immoral and is responsible for corrupting them. Tech is basically the whipping boy for all the government's misdeeds. The government forces tech companies to be dirty (it's against the law to say no to them) and then inflames the public to blame the tech companies for doing it, so that people hate tech and love the government. It's like blaming the hand of the person whipping you while kissing their feet. So until the government stops being evil, there's no ethically safe space for tech workers. We'll just continue to be passed around and used as spoils of war by one twisted regime after another.

> right up until they're not

In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

It's all fun and games until the import brokerage calls to ask where to deliver the 850,000 rubber dog turds you ordered.

> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.

It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.

People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.

If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.

If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.

If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.

Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.

And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.

>This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...",

That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.

I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.

Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.

"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them.

What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.

There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.

The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.

> It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government

... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

This is a very interesting question -- Thomas Hobbes would disagree with you here.

A columnist I read brought this up recently mocking a bunch of Silicon Valley execs supporting monarchism, presumably thinking they would be the educated elite monarchs. His point was that they hadn't invented anything new . . . monarchy is literally one of the oldest ideas in human history.

Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

I do not think so

I think freedom

I read OP as in "they just don't care about privacy [enough to change their behavior]", and in that sense I fully agree.

Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.

Complaining is easy.

> This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.

Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.

People should care about climate change, that's different from whether people do care about it.

More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.

For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.

There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.

I think you misunderstood the post you are replying to.

I didn't read their comment as apathetic. The mass majority just doesn't choose to make privacy an emphasis in their lives.

[dead]

> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?

Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.

If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).

Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.)

As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).

"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.

And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).

Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.

[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/

[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

What alternatives have you found? Do you mostly go to smaller vendors?

The agreement contains provisions by which they can unilaterally change the agreement. They almost all do now, it's pretty standard boilerplate. Not long ago there was a TV, I wanna say it was LG but doublecheck that before you quote me, that shipped an OTA update with a change to the licensing agreement. Either you agreed, or they intentionally disabled all functionality. As we steadily move toward that sort of freedom that means less things you can actually do and more ways you can get screwed over this kind of stuff becomes increasingly common.

It's just "bait and switch" (which is illegal in most countries) with a few more steps.

They should be forced to offer a refund.

"Legal" requires judges that will view the case in a certain way and often needs the force of a government agency to back it. This administration has gutted both those things. Expect it to get worse, not better.

> Amazon is rarely the cheapest way to have a package delivered to your home in less than two days. You can often find people much cheaper if you don’t mind waiting a week or two.

But "waiting a week or two" seems directly at odds with delivered in less than 2 days. End users don't really care about shipping speed per service (unless it's a perishable or temperature-sensitive item). They care about how long it will take to arrive from the time the order is placed.

What’s the alternative? Everyone else has you pay for shipping, and it’s slower.

One week is longer than two days.

Hey Siri, delete all music.

That was an interesting feature to discover.

I am fully in favor of team "I'm never sending my voice anywhere", but assuming a locally-hosted voice control I'll say: voice is a great interface around the house.

If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.

I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection

How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

I’m afraid the only thing we can do at this point is gun for an economic depression, ride out three years of that just like with Hoover (1929–33), and upgrade to New Deal 2.0 beta. There’s no amount of protests that can convince the median Trump voter that anything is wrong in America unless it affects him personally. And no amount of protest will convince Trump that he has made a single mistake in his entire life.

I feel the issue is deeper than that. We no longer buy products, we rent them, it's hard for consumer protection laws to catch up with that (even European).

I 100% agree but unfortunately this is pretty far down the list of our biggest problems at the moment.

[flagged]

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Tesla floating on a cushion of private Saudi wealth?

That’s different, delivering later (for example probably never) is not the same.

This is about removing a privacy feature.

It is illegal, but suing is too costly.

[flagged]

ToS have limits, people in a practical sense aren't really able to read and understand the ToS of every product they buy, which means a ToS can only go so far in the ways it allows companies to be predatory against consumers.

I always wonder how valid these actually are. There's probably a reasonable range.

Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.

The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.

Perhaps there should be license allowing the procurement and operation of consumer devices having overly complex (including language) ToC, making sure that the user knows what it takes to have and to operate a device like that. With categories for the various device categories, just like for vechicles (although cars and trafic rules are much simpler than ToCs, still that is a simple analogy to build up the complexity of ToCs).

When you buy a car there is a lot of required paperwork that they don't really give you time to read, so maybe.

That would be illegal under the unfair contracts law here in Australia.

There are competitors, even open source ones

I mean this in a non snarky serious way: these things are a totally unnecessary luxury electronics item. Don’t buy one at all is also an option.

> Ohh wait, there are no competitors!

Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.

“Reputation” as a free market remedy is such a poor solution, though, as it lags behind the events that change it.

A badly tuned PID loop is better than nothing, I guess.

To continue the metaphor, shouldn't someone close down or regulate "wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer" so that they don't keep stealing people's wheels?

Some people will say just about anything to blame the consumer. You know, like “it’s your own fault for buying a thing from a company.”

They aren't wheel stealing jimmies, but they're definitely data railing bit bangers itching for their next fix. I think choosing to do business with Amazon comes with the same sort of reasonable assumptions. Lie down with dogs, and all that.

Y'all got some more of that data...?

It doesn't sound like a good idea to blame the victim more if the offender is a repeat offender. If anything repeat offenders should be treated harsher.

>Yes but reputation is a factor. If you bought that car from wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer you might need to shoulder some of the blame.

You think the same for food and medicine? remove the "evil" regulations and let the reputation be a factor and every individual should do their research ?

Yeah, I feel the same way. For a small set of features that work fairly reliably it is great. Almost all of my use is:

1. Set $thing timer for $time

2. Add $thing to my grocery list.

3. Weather

4. Convert $amount to $unit.

And it is pretty great when these work, being able to do it in the kitchen without stopping whatever I am doing (example setting the dishwasher timer while putting in the soap, adding milk to the grocery list as I am pulling the last bag out of the fridge) is amazing. No wasted time and no risk of forgetting to pick up my phone and do it after I finish the current task.

But even then it is pretty unreliable. I feel like it has been getting worse over time to be honest.

> ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game

It was. You’re one of the few in the thread to realize that, while others are frothing at the mouth over Democrats vs Republicans or EU vs US. The Echo and like devices were never about you but about putting surveillance gear in your house and getting you to pay for it. At least on old rotary phones the cradle switch or plungers physically broke the circuit that powered the microphones. The modern cell phone and home assistant and security cameras smart televisions and smart vehicles are surveilling you at all times.

Timers, and converting those insane units US recipes use.

You should just drive and call later. You are putting yourself, your kids and the people around you at risk by calling someone else while driving, even when keeping your hands no the steering wheel.

Arguably that comes under the 'accessibility' use case that was mentioned.

The commenter did mention "except for accessibility reasons".

You can preprogram super cheap chips to do voice commands. They come with limitations but they don't wire tap your home to sell private conversation data to advertising companies to later water board your kids into purchasing thing's on social media

>Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!

There is a setting to disable having your voice saved along with options to automatically delete it after a number of months.

With all due respect, the link you’ve linked to is reddit, and the underlying story is a 500. Can you provide an available source or alternative, since this one seems broken?

Your link does not contradict his.

No, that didn't happen.

It's terrible and always has been. As featured in Curb Your Enthusiasm (contains swearing so don't play it in the office loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTefnhbg0Ig

You can't have it both ways