Amazon researcher explains science behind Alexa's newly announced whisper mode

https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/c0e7798d-32bc-4549-9c24-97d204a7bf3a/whisper-to-alexa-and-she-ll-whisper-back

by georgecarlyle76 • 8 years ago

55 72 8 years ago

developer.amazon.com

beauzero2• 8 years ago

"If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in..." considering the other person as Alexa bothers me. I appreciate the tech but the fact that Alexa/Amazon corporate is participating, even passively, in interactions with my children and myself causes me pause.

Invictus0• 8 years ago

If having an always-on microphone in your home didn't already give you pause, I fail to see how this development changes things significantly.

PacifyFish• 8 years ago

I think the sleeping child is the "other person" here.

SweetLlamaMyth• 8 years ago

I'm not sure the takeaway here is that anybody's conferring personhood on Alexa. I think they're just pointing out that there's meaning conveyed in speech beyond just the content of the words spoken. Regardless of what words someone says, saying it in a whisper implies something about the volume that other parties should respond with. I had a coworker with laryngitis last winter, and I found myself unconsciously lowering my volume to be closer to his raspy voice. Tone and volume of speech can communicate a lot; why not allow a spoken word interface to leverage that extra information?

misabon2• 8 years ago

Then why buy it, dude? Do you think Alexa isn’t listening to you when you scold your kids in the kitchen? Seriously.

beauzero2• 8 years ago

I haven't purchased one. Good research should be encouraged. Ethical implications of implementations should be discussed openly.

b_tterc_p2• 8 years ago

I trust these guys know what they’re doing, but determining a whisper from a spoken word doesn’t sound like a difficult problem. I think they should have just used a logistic regression first given that it seems they’re not sure how the model works and whether the last 50 frames matter due to systemic biases in the data collection or actual trends. The graph of their posterior confuses me a bit too. Is the model predicting individually for each frame? Or is it contextualized for all previous frames up to that point? If it’s the former, their approach to picking a conclusion seems off, if it’s the latter, I would question their model.

Edit: although I suppose the graph shown could be one of the better looking cases of certainty and not reflective of their typical result

abtinf• 8 years ago

In my college phonetics class, we studied spectrograms of various human sounds. The spectrogram of whispers is very different from normal speech - it almost just looks like white noise. Forget computers, it is remarkable that even the human brain is able to process it and figure out what words are being said.

euyyn• 8 years ago

It's not only a matter of telling "this was a whisper", but also of actually recognizing what in the world did you say in that whisper, no?

b_tterc_p2• 8 years ago

That is a separate problem from what the article describes.

new_guy• 8 years ago

Alexa never even hears me when I shout at it, nevermind whispering!

_ea1k• 8 years ago

That is because they haven't developed shout mode yet.

krn6• 8 years ago

As a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in the hearts of their homes. Maybe it's the lack of shared history? I highly recommend seeing The Lives of Others (2006)[1] to those, who want to understand why Europeans take their privacy so seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

madhato2• 8 years ago

Cell phones have microphones, are closed source, connected to the Internet and carried with you into all the rooms of your home. Europeans use cell phones so why do they fear home assistants?

krn6• 8 years ago

Cell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. Their apps are. And the user controls both, what apps he installs on his device, and what permissions he gives to them.

umanwizard7• 8 years ago

What’s so hard to believe?

Europeans care about these sorts of privacy issues far, far more than anyone else in the world, for exactly the reason you point out. It’s very abstract to everyone else.

Maybe you’ll be proven right in the end, but for now, I love my Alexa device as it’s extremely convenient.

kzrdude• 8 years ago

I think specifically Germans care about these issues far more than anyone else.

Ntrails• 8 years ago

It's not that I care about privacy particularly - it's that I can't imagine the use case for me personally. They could give them out for free and I'd not be interested in owning one.

umanwizard7• 8 years ago

The “killer app” for me is being able to say “Alexa, turn the light off” when reading a book late at night, instead of having to drag myself out of bed to flip the switch.

blakesterz• 8 years ago

I feel the same way. There's been a few HN threads where everyone chimed in with "here's how I use mine" and each time I read with great interest thinking "These are the people that are going to teach me something new! Something I've been missing because this thing doesn't seem all that useful to me" and I never learned everything new. I don't get the appeal at all, it's the time savings seem to be measured in seconds, and the convenience seems to be so marginal as to be not worth it for me.

wvenable6• 8 years ago

I got one for free; I use it daily for setting all cooking timers and for maintaining my household shopping list. I also use it for playing music in the kitchen.

It's pretty fantastic for all those things and I'd probably buy one now if I needed to replace it.

melling• 8 years ago

Groundhog day: someone on HN rants about the Echo’s privacy.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...

bhauer• 8 years ago

I can appreciate your fatigue with hearing small variations on the same discussion or debate in every thread about these devices, but to discount the utility of the debate is a bit narrow-minded, in my opinion.

The value of debate, even debate that seems redundant, on a popular forum such as HN should not be trivialized. Witness the recent correction Google made with respect to Chrome and its automatic login functionality. Google did not specifically identify where they heard or read the feedback they were responding to, but any reasonable observer suspects they read a lot of it here.

When technologists grieve over the privacy risks of in-home voice "assistant" devices, even when they (as I often do) snarkily refer to them as surveillance devices, the visibility of that debate can serve many possible ends:

* It communicates to the vendors of these devices that technologists are suspicious of their devices. It suggests vendors need to either do better at communicating the privacy safeguards they have already created or do better at creating privacy safeguards in the first place if they want to reduce the degree of negative reaction they receive from technologists.

* It communicates to others who do not provide these devices that there is a market for more secure devices of the same flavor, such as self-hosted in-home voice assistants that do processing locally and exclusively for the benefit of the customer. Technologists may not be saying that specifically, but it's communicated as an undercurrent.

* It communicates to casual readers in the thread that there are risks that they should consider before purchasing and installing one of these devices. Providing clear criticism is one of the ways high-engagement people influence low-engagement people.

* It indicates that a segment of the population will not happily stand by if R&D resources are reallocated away from traditional user interfaces to voice UIs on these cloud-connected devices. It's hard to measure, but there is no doubt that as R&D resources are allocated to voice UIs, some amount of investment is moved away from building UIs that use traditional touch, type, and click UIs. People criticizing these devices are in a small way saying "this is not the future I want." It's a way of participating in the economy and communicating demand to suppliers.

Bottom line: Even though you and I have both "been here, done that" the value is not zero.

overcast• 8 years ago

As an American, why does every topic turn into a jab from the other side of the ocean? Particularly when some of those places there are overrun by surveillance and the heavy use of cell phones. We're all in this together.

oulipo• 8 years ago

This is why we are building Snips at https://snips.ai: create a 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice AI which will be open-sourced

We did this to solve privacy issues, and empower makers!

verytrivial• 8 years ago

As a European (dweller), I am also concerned by the little devices habitually carried by our political representatives. "Ho, ho, ho, Syria sounds like Siri!"[1] but seriously, just like contestants on the TV show Big Brother say, you stop noticing the surveillance after a while and start sharing things you did even realise you were sharing.

"Surveilled By Default" is corrosive agenda to push.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/watch-siri-heckles-british-defense-...

_cs2017_• 8 years ago

Please consider not describing your opinion as if it represents Europe.

I'm sure there are a lot of people in Europe who disagree with you (and a lot of people in America who agree).

Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity, and then claiming that your opinion is intrinsic to that group, invites some rather unpleasant associations.

krn6• 8 years ago

Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity

It's neither nationality, nor ethnicity. I explicitly raised the question of history, and how it forms different values in the society. Why doesn't the US have the equivalent of GDPR?

mattnewton• 8 years ago

I realize I’m not the target audience of the smart speaker but I already carry a silent interface to anything I would like to do with Alexa in my pocket.

Listening to whispers is creepy.

rrobukef2• 8 years ago

The article hasn't been published for a whole day and the link to the announcement (the first link) is already broken. Can anyone provide it? Thanks

rrobukef2• 8 years ago

The link works now.

Amazon researcher explains science behind Alexa's newly announced whisper mode

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