Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to cloud

Years ago after getting one I was messing around in settings on Amazon's Alexa website and noticed a log of commands/messages sent to Alexa. I reviewed them and was horrified to see "why does daddy always beat me". Best to let your daughter win at Uno in this age of always-on connectivity. Or just unplug it, which is what I did.

I&#x27;ve noticed since getting a new mac, that on-device dictation is no longer possible, a modal pops up forcing you to hit agree in order to get dictation. Never clicking that.<p>The direction of major operating systems neutering themselves in favour of deep service integration does not fill one with hope

There seems to be some tremendous confusion here. The vast majority of Alexa-family devices perform no local processing except for the activation word (&quot;Alexa&quot;). I didn&#x27;t even realize that some of the more recent devices supported an opt-in for local processing.<p>This kind of makes sense, at least to me: local processing will always be limited. The entire premise of the original Echo devices was that all the magic happened in the cloud. It seems like not much has really changed?

500 million Alexa-enabled devices were sold, hopefully some can be repurposed and kept out of landfills.<p>Updating Echo Dot V1 to newer kernel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrerh.gitlab.io&#x2F;echoroot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrerh.gitlab.io&#x2F;echoroot&#x2F;</a><p>Echo Dot V2 Android tinkering, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;echohacking&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Echo-Dot-v2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;echohacking&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Echo-Dot-v2</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andygoetz.org&#x2F;tags&#x2F;dot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andygoetz.org&#x2F;tags&#x2F;dot&#x2F;</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=H0IEMVDebzE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=H0IEMVDebzE</a>

Related: <i>The Alexa feature &quot;do not send voice recordings&quot; you enabled no longer available (discuss.systems) | 929 points by luu 1 day ago | 664 comments |</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43385268">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43385268</a>

Pure anecdote, but it reminds me of that time, I mentioned on a call that a particular piece of code was a time bomb waiting to explode, only to have Alexa wake up and listen as I was standing nearby and noticed the light. I immediately disconnected it and never looked back.

There&#x27;s a way to download all of your Alexa requests. I recommend it to everyone. It was interesting and horrifying to get literally all of them, from day 1. I noticed how tired I sound in the mornings or evenings. I started understanding patterns of my thoughts and needs. The Alexa went to the bin quickly after that session of exploration and insight.

Related – is anyone working on an open home assistant? Google, Apple, Amazon are all taking so long to bring latest advancements across to their products

Recent conversation about this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43385268">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43385268</a>

I don&#x27;t understand why Alexa&#x2F;Siri etc don&#x27;t just keep their hardcoded rules for things like &quot;set an alarm&quot; and only ship things to a cloud LLM if they don&#x27;t match a rule.

I&#x27;d be interested to see the percentage of users who have the &quot;Do Not Send Voice Recordings&quot; feature enabled. My guess is .001% or less

Okay with this level of integration in daily, private life (able to record background noise not related to the request…potentially or actually), consider this:<p>Is Alexa hearing a gunshot a request for assistance? It’s not a voice command, okay, but where does “oh that’s not our business” really end in vast data collection platforms such as this? Does Alexa have any duty to report voice requests about self-harm?

You would think we could actually do all voice processing locally now? The models that do voice, speech, and language processing aren&#x27;t that big...an 8b model would be completely feasible for an affordable device, if not home server.

I would be excited if Apple would add great GPT answering capabilities on my first-gen homepods, even if it meant having to send all queries to the cloud. I can unplug them if I need privacy.

I only have one Alexa and it won&#x27;t bother me to remove it or replace it with another HomePod. I only use it to check the weather and occasionally to listen to random facts while I get ready in the morning. The fact that it has a digital clock is a nice bonus that HomePods don&#x27;t yet have, though.

Yep, gonna unplug my Alexa tonight now. Maybe I&#x27;ll try setting up openHAB for controlling my smart lights.

We should make AI generated conversations to overload their surveillance.

Huh. How subpoena-able. Great timing! Throw these things in the trash.

[dupe]<p>Lots of discussions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43365424">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43365424</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43367536">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43367536</a>

What if the internet is off?

I mean, it seems that local hardware can be a limiting factor on the quality of the LLMs you can deploy. Why should they shoot their feet?<p>Even Apple did open their AI system to OpenAI (and potentially other vendors in the future).<p>As long as there is explicit consent to do so, it is fine. Nobody forces you to buy an Alexa product.

Because now that local processing is ever-more powerful and local storage dirt-cheap, it&#x27;s time to move everything to &quot;the cloud.&quot;<p>So ignorant, especially with music. Whoops, no Internet access on the plane? No music for you.

Considering what a blatant spyware it is, it is unbelievable that people pay for it (not that I would keep one at my home even if it was free).

Throw your wiretap in the garbage where it belongs.

pikachu_surprised.jpg

This should be a godsend to any FOSS home assistants out there.