
Amazon researcher explains science behind Alexa's newly announced whisper mode - georgecarlyle76
https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/c0e7798d-32bc-4549-9c24-97d204a7bf3a/whisper-to-alexa-and-she-ll-whisper-back
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beauzero
"If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else
walks in..." considering the other person as Alexa bothers me. I appreciate
the tech but the fact that Alexa/Amazon corporate is participating, even
passively, in interactions with my children and myself causes me pause.

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misabon
Then why buy it, dude? Do you think Alexa isn’t listening to you when you
scold your kids in the kitchen? Seriously.

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beauzero
I haven't purchased one. Good research should be encouraged. Ethical
implications of implementations should be discussed openly.

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misabon
His isn’t ethical implications discussion. This is you using every one of
these feature release pages as your product review page. If nothing has
changed about your position why even tell us? It’s like all those people who
comment on software built with Go. “I don’t understand why Terraform uses
Golang. It has no generics”

That’s not “programming language feature discussion”. It’s obsessively off-
topic behaviour.

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new_guy
Alexa never even hears me when I shout at it, nevermind whispering!

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jsight
That is because they haven't developed shout mode yet.

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mattnewton
I realize I’m not the target audience of the smart speaker but I already carry
a silent interface to anything I would like to do with Alexa in my pocket.

Listening to whispers is creepy.

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rrobukef
The article hasn't been published for a whole day and the link to the
announcement (the first link) is already broken. Can anyone provide it? Thanks

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rrobukef
The link works now.

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krn
As a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean
are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in
the hearts of their homes. Maybe it's the lack of shared history? I highly
recommend seeing The Lives of Others (2006)[1] to those, who want to
understand why Europeans take their privacy so seriously.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)

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Ntrails
It's not that I care about privacy particularly - it's that I can't imagine
the use case for me personally. They could give them out for free and I'd not
be interested in owning one.

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umanwizard
The “killer app” for me is being able to say “Alexa, turn the light off” when
reading a book late at night, instead of having to drag myself out of bed to
flip the switch.

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bloomer
You mean the clapper?

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umanwizard
A particularly nice clapper that has secondary features like telling you the
weather, serving as an alarm, and so on, yeah.

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b_tterc_p
I trust these guys know what they’re doing, but determining a whisper from a
spoken word doesn’t sound like a difficult problem. I think they should have
just used a logistic regression first given that it seems they’re not sure how
the model works and whether the last 50 frames matter due to systemic biases
in the data collection or actual trends. The graph of their posterior confuses
me a bit too. Is the model predicting individually for each frame? Or is it
contextualized for all previous frames up to that point? If it’s the former,
their approach to picking a conclusion seems off, if it’s the latter, I would
question their model.

Edit: although I suppose the graph shown could be one of the better looking
cases of certainty and not reflective of their typical result

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euyyn
It's not only a matter of telling "this was a whisper", but also of actually
recognizing what in the world did you say in that whisper, no?

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b_tterc_p
That is a separate problem from what the article describes.

