A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.
Twelve years ago Moto X was launched by Motorola, at that time controlled by Google. I had it and at any moment you could say “Hello Google, what time is it?” and it responded. I was constantly listening. All the time. And it was a perfectly normal phone regarding battery life or data usage. TWELVE years ago, imagine how much easier would be to implement that now, with more powerful and efficient chips and bigger batteries.
From an article about Moto X back then:
“If you want to take a selfie, you should be able to simply say “Take a selfie!” In short, your smartphone should live up to its name. That’s the goal with the Moto Voice and Moto Assist software integrated into the second generation Moto X smartphone.
And to do that, the Moto X is always listening, for verbal commands from the user and also ambient cues of the context. That emergent behavior is spawned by complex interactions between the software and hardware”
Only much latter I came to the conclusion that with Moto X Google was making its first tests on using the microphone for mass surveillance.
The official position is it has an enclave that locally listens only for the wake-word, and when it hears that, it activates the audio connection to the cloud.
There’s a difference between a wake word and general purpose speech recognition. A simple wake word can be done in simple hardware on the device, while general purpose speech processing either requires heavy, relatively constant CPU usage, or heavy network traffic to pipe the audio to a server for processing.
I think for marketing purposes you could have a hot list of marketing terms (presumably these would be scarce so sold to high bidding companies) and match against those which would be a sort of middle ground between the general purpose processing and a single wake word.
You could do it in a cheap (in terms of energy) and sloppy way where it only needs to be correct most of the time of the time to have a net positive impact on ad targeting when reconciled with other user data.
But they is not even how those things work.
And if you read the story the mic never came on. There has been no one who has found that the mic is sending audio to the cloud but yet people keep on believing it.
See what they are actually doing and be mad about that as it is bad.
Twelve years ago Moto X was launched by Motorola, at that time controlled by Google. I had it and at any moment you could say “Hello Google, what time is it?” and it responded. I was constantly listening. All the time. And it was a perfectly normal phone regarding battery life or data usage. TWELVE years ago, imagine how much easier would be to implement that now, with more powerful and efficient chips and bigger batteries.
From an article about Moto X back then: “If you want to take a selfie, you should be able to simply say “Take a selfie!” In short, your smartphone should live up to its name. That’s the goal with the Moto Voice and Moto Assist software integrated into the second generation Moto X smartphone. And to do that, the Moto X is always listening, for verbal commands from the user and also ambient cues of the context. That emergent behavior is spawned by complex interactions between the software and hardware”
Only much latter I came to the conclusion that with Moto X Google was making its first tests on using the microphone for mass surveillance.
The official position is it has an enclave that locally listens only for the wake-word, and when it hears that, it activates the audio connection to the cloud.
There’s a difference between a wake word and general purpose speech recognition. A simple wake word can be done in simple hardware on the device, while general purpose speech processing either requires heavy, relatively constant CPU usage, or heavy network traffic to pipe the audio to a server for processing.
I think for marketing purposes you could have a hot list of marketing terms (presumably these would be scarce so sold to high bidding companies) and match against those which would be a sort of middle ground between the general purpose processing and a single wake word.
You could do it in a cheap (in terms of energy) and sloppy way where it only needs to be correct most of the time of the time to have a net positive impact on ad targeting when reconciled with other user data.
There’s also a third possibility most people ignore for what ever reason…
Speech-to-text and send to servers. No need for heavy CPU usage that way and don’t need to send MBs of Audio files…
With the technology we have today it’s easier than ever before… “colgate” and give you right into your face an ad for toothpaste !
No need for audio or complex processing. All new models come even with AI processor units… Haha ! What a joke !
And we just accepted it, because we trusted that every company was working in our best interest… Jesus, what a long con…
But they is not even how those things work. And if you read the story the mic never came on. There has been no one who has found that the mic is sending audio to the cloud but yet people keep on believing it. See what they are actually doing and be mad about that as it is bad.
The whole point is that there’s no need so send audio, it would be childish to do so.