this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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[–] Ronno@feddit.nl 50 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?

Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!

[–] iarigby@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago

home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 12 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.

If you have a "To Do" list, and speak "Add cooking to my To Do list", it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:

  • Todo
  • To-do
  • to do
  • ToDo
  • To-Do
  • ...

The system will say it couldn't find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,..... and you have very little control over this.

HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.

They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people's hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.

I do not understand why there's no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 6 points 16 hours ago

Because it takes time to implement. It will come.

[–] Auntievenim@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago

I've seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it's usually a conversation I'm nowhere close to understanding lol

Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?

[–] Billybob22@feddit.uk 15 points 14 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.

[–] PeterisBacon@lemm.ee 95 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I have always told people to avoid Amazon.

They have doorbells to watch who comes to your house and when.

Indoor and outdoor security cameras to monitor when you go outside, for how long, and why.

They acquired roomba, which not only maps out your house, but they have little cameras in them as well, another angle to monitor you through your house in more personal areas that indoor cameras might not see.

They have the Alexa products meant to record you at all times for their own use and intent.

Why do you think along with Amazon Prime subscriptions you get free cloud storage, free video streaming, free music? They are categorizing you in the most efficient and accurate way possible.

Boycott anything Amazon touches

[–] swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.com 37 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.

[–] KeefChief13@lemmy.world 19 points 19 hours ago

Christ, finally a win

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[–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago

They backed out of the Roomba deal. Now iRobot is going down the shitter.

[–] jcs@lemmy.world 16 points 16 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.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 31 points 18 hours ago
[–] muh_shroom@lemmy.ca 32 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 3 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Do the device you wrote this on have a microphone?

[–] SoulWager@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 hours ago

None of my devices have one that's lacking a physical switch to disable it.

[–] MiniMoose4Free@lemm.ee 3 points 12 hours ago

Yes, but they'll conveniently ignore that on devices they are addicted to.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 201 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 103 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 23 hours 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 46 points 22 hours ago (22 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.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

My mom has one of those Google ones, I hate it.

[–] b1t@lemm.ee 2 points 10 hours ago

My brother and a buddy both have Alexas. And yeah, I hate being anywhere near the thing.

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[–] 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org 79 points 22 hours 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 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours 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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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 12 points 16 hours 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.

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago

It was a non advertised feature only available in the US and in English only

[–] Doctor_Satan@lemmy.world 11 points 16 hours 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.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 points 12 hours ago

Which Echo devices ever supported local only processing? They cost about £30. There's no kit that can do decent voice commands for that money. You'd be lucky to have a device that processes claps to turn the lights on for that.

[–] blackberry@midwest.social 32 points 21 hours 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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[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 9 points 16 hours 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.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

This is legal, even in the US?

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[–] MintyFresh@lemmy.world 33 points 22 hours 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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[–] DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world 50 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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[–] impudentmortal@lemmy.world 10 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

How disheartening. I knew going in that there would be privacy issues but I figured for the service it was fine. I also figure my phone is always listening anyway.

As someone with limited mobility, my echo has been really nice to control my smart devices like lights and TV with just my voice.

Are there good alternatives or should I just accept things as they are?

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[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 20 points 21 hours 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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