
Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in Real-Time, even when offline - bgrynol
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/googles-new-voice-recorder-app-transcribes-in-real-time-even-when-offline/
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the_duke
An interesting angle to this: if your phone is powerful enough to transcribe
audio in real time without any external processing, and considering how cheap
it is to transfer and store text, how long before autocratic countries start
persisting everything you say ?

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pacala
Persisting is benign. Actively processing, less so. Imagine stack-ranking
party alignment sentiment, based on everything the subjects ever said.

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the_duke
The processing part was implied.

My point was just: with audio, you might want to think about really recording,
storing and processing everything. But if a phone can do high quality
transcriptions and just send them off to government data centers, it becomes
sort of a no brainer.

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m-p-3
Also available on APKMirror

[https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-
recorder/](https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-recorder/)

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gundmc
Loving the trend towards federated on-device ML. The more data that stays on-
device rather than going to Google/whoever's cloud the better.

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m463
I would't put it past the cloud providers to ALSO snarf up the transcript (and
possibly the raw audio to help with training).

It might even be a cost savings.

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jrpt
If they're federating the ML, they can also do federated learning.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning))
Although in most cases I suspect it's probably not federated learning, instead
just a deployed model that they've trained with in house data.

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OrgNet
so, where can I download the app for a different phone? I'd like to record to
text my day on a phone that has no internet. I can't see it on the "play"
store

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pkaye
I think it needs a special AI accelerator chip which is first coming in the
Pixel 4 phones.

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HaloZero
so the chances of it on the iPhone are slim then :(

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dzhiurgis
Apple would more likely to remove every single feature from iPhone before
allowing something like that on phone calls.

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m463
I thought apple already had ML functions like this for facial unlock.

They also used to provide transcripts of voicemail done locally on the phone
(although it was not great accuracy)

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gen3
They also use ML for "Hey Siri" and the face detection in the photos app.

Edit: Here is the article where apple talks about how "Hey Siri" works:
[https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-
siri.html](https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html)

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jakeogh
Google: totally not an APT

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propogandist
on a somewhat related note, I've discovered that youtube is somehow
exfiltrating conversations I have during the day, to tailor content on my YT
feed..

There does not seem to be any one app responsible for the data exfil, so I've
been led to believe they're building models (or transcribing text locally) and
sending it up whenever android phones home (constantly).

I've tried attempting to block data exfiltration (Netguard etc) but nothing
seemed to have worked and I had to switch devices.

If they're able to do on-device transcriptions and the tech is mature enough
that they're going to release it as a standalone product with a big launch, I
can now believe they have some similar tech running on devices to support
their core-metrics (engagement w/ YT content, which drives Ad revenue).

Play close attention to your YT video feeds and you may notice the behavior
I've observed too.

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copperx
I'm not going to say it's not technically possible, because it is (although it
would be a huge battery or bandwidth drain, not to mention an insane tech
scandal if found to be true); but if the only proof you have is a video feed
that resembles your conversations I'm going to guess you're giving that data
to Google is some other way. There are a thousand ways this could be
happening, and most them have a psychological component.

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propogandist
I've made significant efforts to minimize dependency on google services and
these are items that appear w/o any interactions or data being explictly
shared to the google platform. It was hard to believe at first, but after
quite a bit of testing I realized what was happening.

