this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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[–] Billybob22@feddit.uk 15 points 21 hours ago

Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It's very liberating and I don't miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 204 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 104 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Off-device processing has been the default from day one. The only thing changing is the removal for local processing on certain devices, likely because the new backing AI model will no longer be able to run on that hardware.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 51 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With on-device processing, they don’t need to send audio. They can just send the text, which is infinitely smaller and easier to encrypt as “telemetry”. They’ve probably got logs of conversations in every Alexa household.

[–] b1t@lemm.ee 48 points 1 day ago (23 children)

This has always blown my mind. Watching people willingly allow Big Brother-esque devices into their home for very, very minor conveniences like turning on some gimmicky multi-colored light bulbs. Now they're literally using home "security" cameras that store everything on some random cloud server. I'll truly never understand.

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[–] 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org 81 points 1 day ago (5 children)

People are saying don't get an echo but this is the tip of an iceberg. My coworkers' cell phones are eavesdropping. My neighbors doorbells record every time I leave the house. Almost every new vehicle mines us for data. We can avoid some of the problem but we cannot avoid it all. We need a bigger, more aggressive solution if we are going to have a solution at all.

[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

How about regulation? Let's start with saying data about me belongs to me, not to whoever collected the data, as is currently the case

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[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago
[–] muh_shroom@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I can’t believe people are still voluntarily wire tapping themselves in 2025

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[–] jcs@lemmy.world 16 points 23 hours ago

If anyone remembers the Mycroft Mark II Voice Assistant Kickstarter and was disappointed when development challenges and patent trolls caused the company's untimely demise, know that hope is not lost for a FOSS/OSHW voice assistant insulated from Big Tech..

FAQ: OVOS, Neon, and the Future of the Mycroft Voice Assistant

Disclaimer: I do not represent any of these organizations in any way; I just believe in their mission and wish them all the success in getting there by spreading the word.

[–] blackberry@midwest.social 32 points 1 day ago (2 children)

be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it's been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I didn't even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.

  1. Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
  2. Locally listen for the wake word (typically "Alexa") using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
  3. Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
  4. Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)

Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don't see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.

Also, while they may be "always recording" they don't transmit everything. It's only so if you say "Alexaturnthelightsoff" really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.

I'm not trying to defend Amazon, and I don't necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn't seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn't know.

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[–] Doctor_Satan@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.

[–] DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world 52 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Today: "...they will be deleted after Alexa processes your requests."

Some point in the not-so-distant future: "We are reaching out to let you know that your voice recordings will no longer be deleted. As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities, we have decided to no longer support this feature."

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[–] MintyFresh@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Easy fix: don't buy this garbage to begin with. It's terrible for the environment, terrible for your privacy, of dubious value to begin with.

If every man is an onion, one of my deeper layers is crumudgeon. So take that into account when I say fuck all portable speakers. I'm so tired of hearing everyone's shitty noise. Just fucking everywhere. It takes one person feeling entitled to blast the shittiest music available to ruin everyone in a 500yd radius's day. If this is you, I hope you stub your toe on every coffee table, hit your head on every door jam, miss every bus.

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[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago

No way! The microphones you put all over your house are listening to you? What a shocker!
If you bought these this is on you. Trash them now.

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So... if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn't have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That's how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you've installed. It does a match against the phrase 'slots' and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it's all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don't be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don't like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you'll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it's shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There's no free lunch.

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