Technology

My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there's no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it's definitely always been sent to them.

Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.

No idea, haven't used those. The HA Voice is open source through and through.

I'm using a Pi Zero as a voice satellite with an additional mic hat and a speaker hanging off the audio output and it's ... ok

There's definitely much lower WAF with this option

The voice assistant has built-in audio which appears to be high (enough) quality and considering it's case, power, etc, not to mention funding the advancement of open source voice control, it's just overall “better”

If you've got a Pi lying around with a mic & speaker, definitely give it a go

That doesn't matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.

Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.

Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.

And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.

true, but there's a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.

alexa! install an oligarchy!

The old "privacy focused" setting made speech processing local. The new "privacy focused setting" means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won't store the audio after it's been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

This all seems like it's missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you're giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can't always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn't seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it's associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don't need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.

You can also buy some on Facebook Marketplace.

More directly comparable, is the Ring cameras inside the house.

True, but a mobile phone is basically a world brain, calculator, camera, flashlight, you can watch movies on it in hi def, hate it all you want, it's one of the most versatile tools on the planet. An echo dot, it just spy garbage and nothing else

Phones are at least easier to justify since everyone kinda needs one now and there aren't many great private options, especially for the lay person