News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Amazon Echo. Parent comment

Re:Amazon Echo by meepmorp on Thursday November 06, 2014 @02:49PM (#8569309)
There's no way this thing has the power to do adequate voice recognition on device for arbitray speakers and queries, even given a limited domain. It's sending everything to Amazon for processing. The only thing it probably recognizes by itself is "Alexa."
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon Echo by stronglikedan on Thursday November 06, 2014 @02:52PM (#8569346)
Right, so it sends the commands that you give it only after it recognizes a pre-programmed word. It will likely not send up casual conversation surrounding the command, as there would not be a non-nefarious reason to do that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon Echo by IshKebab on Thursday November 06, 2014 @04:22PM (#8569869)
False positives... But yeah they're probably rare. The real risk is that it could be hacked or national security lettered to listen permanently. The FBI has form in this regard.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon Echo by foxylad on Thursday November 06, 2014 @08:24PM (#8570831)
I'm guessing it's Android under the covers, and I believe that Google voice recognition is now processed on the device - so it might well be powerful enough to do the voice recognition without the cloud.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon Echo by meepmorp on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:34AM (#8571326)
I believe it's only limited command processing, and less accurate than what can be done with more powerful computers.
[ Parent | on HN ]