this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
226 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2260 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Audio esp for voices can be super compressed, it's not like music, few hours of low quality audio can be as little as a few MB. There is also hardware transcoding and as the exact modifications of the SOC aren't public, it could be doing that too
Don't be naive about how shitty corporations are, they are not really disincentivized to not break laws as the fines are just a cost of business.
It doesn't even have to be that much. Obviously these devices can do sound to text conversion, that's how they interpret commands. That can convert hours of stored conversation to text, zip it up and send it as a few kilobytes along with the next network request it makes for a legit purpose.
Do you really think one of those cheap little nuggets has the computing power to do that? The only thing it really does locally is listen to the wake word, everything else, including audio, it sends off to the Zon.
No way is it sitting there converting everything it hears to text.
If my cheap ass $250 cad phone can do it locally I'm sure the echo can too
We would easily be able to tell if an Alexa was constantly streaming audio data by monitoring its network traffic. It'd be just a wasteful inefficient implementation to stream everything 24/7. Makes much more sense to only start recording when it hears certain keywords that it can recognize locally beyond "Alexa".
Who says it's constantly streamed? Who says it's not stored or transcribed then sent off in a small package?