I thought kbg archiver solved it eons ago.
The HomePod for example uses the Apple A8 chip which is a very capable chip used to power the iPhone 6 than did way more than encode/decode audio.
Interesting point, my guess would be that not many would notice since a HomePod/Alexa/Google Home would usually sit somewhere in a corner of a room/under the TV and not be regularly touched since you don't need to touch it to control it most of the time.
I am not even sure it would be that much heat, my x86 laptop can play video for a very long amount of time before getting noticeably hot, granted with a fan, however these ARM CPUs get noticeably less hot than your average Intel chip, even without a fan.
Even for the cheaper devices, the CPU is probably capable enough, (maybe excluding the cheapest Echo Dot/Nest).
The Echo Show devices even have a screen and are actually designed to play videos from all kind of sources, (decode), as well as for videocalling, (encode) and they're £60 right now on Amazon UK.
They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their technical ability.
As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at 800 KiB.
Even when they actually do ship audio off the device for processing, I'd be surprised if it's done losslessly.
Not with the tiny cheap CPUs that are one these devices they couldn't. Or at least not very effective speech recognition.
Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic reasoning.
Support link https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028205592-Usin...
So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in (2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devices have relatively small amounts of RAM 3) Echo devices aren’t constantly hammering WiFi connections
From this, one should be able to deduce that the wakeword engine detects events and streams clips to servers only in situations that match events and settings to support these features. Why? Because processing, transit, and storage aren’t free, and one can’t store data in RAM that isn’t there or transmit data over WiFi without the physical layer showing signs of it. Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice assistants.
Take the number of Alexa devices sold and run the numbers for all of those devices sending audio data to AWS all the time. The costs would be astronomical. The same goes for Google (though not with AWS). They’re no doubt incorporating the detectors into their on-device models.