Alexa heard what you did last summer – and she knows what that was, too: AI recognizes activities from sound Boffins have devised a way to make eavesdropping smartwatches, computers, mobile devices, and speakers with endearing names like Alexa better aware of what's going on around them. In a paper to be presented today at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Berlin, Germany, computer scientists …
But it could be fun trying to confuse Alexa.
Many moons ago a friend got a BBC sound effects tape and had fun with the message on his ansaphone - sounds of police sirens, helicopters and shooting in the background, to a gentle voice-over of "I'm afraid I can't get to the phone just at the moment, please leave a message"
Would Alexa call the plods if it heard shooting?
Forgive my ignorance of the state of the art - But can it distinguish "live" sounds from a TV or radio?
(I read the article twice, and all the comments, and no-one seems to have addressed this elephant in the room)
On the other hand, this could be incredibly useful for relaying the wife's softly-spoken orders - usually issued when I'm in another room/beside a boiling kettle or running tap/wearing headphones.
"Forgive my ignorance of the state of the art - But can it distinguish "live" sounds from a TV or radio?"
The article did say they trained it with sound effects from Hollywood, so my guess is no. Or alternatively yes, except the sounds from the TV will be taken as being "real", but the "live" sounds are obviously fake.
Just because you can do a thing it doesn't mean you should."
And for that matter, who do something you don't even need to do?
"The researchers suggest their system could be used, for example, to send a notification when a laundry load finished."
Surely your "smart" washing machine will email you when it's finished.
"Quite, and the researchers saying 'this should all be doable locally as people don't really want to be spied on' is like saying 'Lions don't really want to hurt people' - but they have to eat, right?"
Sure, but put away your paranoia for a instant and remember this is CMU saying this, as in the people that developed CMU Sphinx, and pocket sphinx. Which today is about the best bet for a local only speech recognition system as your able to compile/build at home. For that they should be at least given a small amount of the benefit of the doubt that they were being sincere.
I should know, I've been making my own smart speaker that is local network only to control some local network only home automation devices and currently I have pocketsphinx running on a beaglebone black but have some tuning issues to overcome...
Of course amazon et all will pish all over their good priniciples and aims, but there's still a small chance to carve out out a niche for privacy respecting alternatives because of these guys/gals work.
"There is no way to recover the audio"
...until another team of researchers discovers a way to contextually reconstruct spoken phonemes with 99% accuracy.
Great "use cases" guys. Alerting you when your washing machine is done? There's already a 100dB buzzer on it for a reason. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but they already make wi-fi enabled washing machines if you want it to post to your Twitter feed.
I'm sure these crazy inventors would be completely mystified by the feeling of revulsion that I get at the very thought of having such a device in my home.They are living in a completely different world.
THIS^ We keep hearing about more and more ways that these "boffins" are trying to come up with better ways to spy on people. Why don't all you twats of this sort out there work on something useful or, failing that, just fuck off and die?
Any device in my home that turns out to have a microphone on when I'm not specifically talking to it will get fixed with a hammer.
Currently, as a retired boffin, I feel that if we were in a position to hold the world to ransom with nuclear weapons in a volcano, it would be an improvement. We'd simply demand that all the politicians stop fighting and promoting stupid policies, spend the defence budgets on space exploration, fixing climate change and food security, and get on with doing something more interesting.
We keep hearing about more and more ways that these "boffins" are trying to come up with better ways to spy on people.
That research will happen regardless. It's much better when it's made public, as in this case, than when some giant corporation keeps it to itself. This way we at least know what's been done in the field, and can consider how to use or counter it.
Sorry, they are living in the real world. It's here and growing. You are the one left behind.
I just saw a youtube ad for Smart cameras for your home, billed as a must have for security of your home....
Lots of enticing pics of well-furnished empty rooms. It's a damn potential showroom and shopping catalogue for would be home invaders.
Tap that, and you can case a nice house from the safety of your own, and know when and how long the residents will be out and how vulnerable they are....
We've long gone beyond real world, we're in a fantasy at this point
It's a good thing for them, because they will be able to sell it for good money to Google/Amazon who will employ it to improve their profiles.
(And obviously also for those who will use it to collect "leverage" on certain people.)
But, as the article notes, we're just a small bunch of old fogeys always complaining; The younger generation is quite adamant about their right to be spied upon. Oh well.
"The younger generation is quite adamant about their right to be spied upon"
they have grown up on reality TV... and post their mundane activities on social media like anybody else cares about their bowels or whatever.
yeah, and if one o' those hears ME sneeze it'll sound like... "Ah, Ah, AH SHIT!!!" [yes I really do that, I hate sneezing - it interrupts what I'm doing]. I wonder if it'd call an ambulance, thinking it means "I fell and can't get up" (and of course THAT introduces the topic of false alarms generated by a big-nanny spy-on-your-life system). And no, I don't need Alexa to order me some narcoleptic cold medicine either.
"Harrison said a related project called Vibrosight, which involves using a laser to measure physical vibrations of an object to determine what it's doing, has already achieved sufficient accuracy for deployment."
Vibrosight? ..really.. Does it need a couple of AA batteries?
A couple of hours work in the audio editor and quick and easy distribution on YouTube can convince Jeff's little snoopbot that most people live in bizarre alien infested factories with opera singers, jet aircraft, laser guns and church bells, where doors slamming and creaking reveal populations of sinister schoolchildren, marching bands and herds of geese.
"On Tuesday, August 24th, I logged Mr. and Mrs. Marketing Hack having marital relations. Based on the excited chipmunk sounds Mrs. Hack made during this encounter, I sent a recommendation to our ad servers that in the future she be served with the commensurate battery of online pet store advertising."
"On Tuesday, August 24th, I logged Mr. and Mrs. Marketing Hack having marital relations. Based on the excited chipmunk sounds Mrs. Hack made during this encounter, I sent a recommendation to our ad servers that in the future she be served with the commensurate battery of online pet store advertising."
Well, from what I've seen of these annoying "targeted ads" that just show you things you've already purchased or own already, I predict that Alexa will just show Mrs. Marketing Hack more of the same old same old, which in this case would be ads for Mr. Marketing Hack.
"What CMU's comp sci types have added is a sophisticated sound-labeling model trained on high-quality sound effects libraries, the sort used in Hollywood entertainment and electronic games."
I wonder if they realise that those sorts of sound libraries are often built with fake sounds? Look up what it is that foley artists actually do to to create sound effects. Some examples from Wikipedia -
* Corn starch in a leather pouch makes the sound of snow crunching.
* A heavy staple gun combined with other small metal sounds make good gun noises.
* Burning plastic garbage bags cut into strips makes a realistic sounding candle or soft non-crackling fire when the bag melts and drips to the ground.
That last one is fun. Is the device hearing you burning some candles for a romantic interlude, or is your kitchen garbage bin on fire? Having the fire brigade turning up at your tenth anniversary dinner might not be a good idea.
* Frozen romaine lettuce makes bone or head injury noises.
* Canned dog food can be used for alien pod embryo expulsions and monster vocalizations.
Soooo, is your home under alien attack, or are you feeding your dog?
I wonder if they realise that those sorts of sound libraries are often built with fake sounds?
Irrelevant. They build the model, then they test it against the gold standard, which in a case like this is typically human judges.1
If the system does well relative to the standard, then it doesn't matter whether it was trained on authentic or synthetic data. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
1Hopefully a representative pool of them, tested using a methodologically-sound approach, so the baseline is useful. I'm just assuming that here.
I'm trying to find words to express how completely unacceptable I find these new features, and failing miserably. Who the f**k decides that these kind of features are 'acceptable' ? Who decides that listening and trying to make sense of people's private conversations to sling another ad (yeah right) is an acceptable activity for a business.
And what's even more bewildering is that the American public, with their endless rhetoric about their right to bear arms to protect their constitutional freedom accept this behavior from their companies.
Someone should maybe explain to them that the amendment providing them this freedom was not thought up so kids could walk into their schools and start murdering their fellow pupils because they wear the wrong trousers, but to protect them from bent governments and people trying to take away their right to self determination.
I would expect a small army of minigun wielding freedom fighters would've taken up position in front of Amazon, Google et al HQ's by now.
I'm pretty much convinced that the likes of Samsung, Huawei, Nokia and every other phone maker have this capability built into their handsets but are just not telling us.
Pete
murdering their fellow pupils because they wear the wrong trousers
That's rather missing the issue.
Schools are barely managed jungles, a kind of open prison with secure facility overtones.
The whole system is as long overdue a rethink and a redesign as much as the gun freedom laws in the U.S.
@ Charles 9 - "... the situation's deteriorating to the point neither parent can be counted to be home for any significant length of time (or else they go behind on the bills and lose their domicile)."
I would expect that to part of the overhaul of the system. Valuing parenthood is something 1st world countries should be doing.
"I would expect that to part of the overhaul of the system. Valuing parenthood is something 1st world countries should be doing."
But even parenting comes second to "a roof over their heads", as shelter tends to be a prerequisite, and the situation appears to be a crisis of a social rather than political nature. Consider that no one's willing to mention the O-word in public, and there's more than one form of overpopulation. And before you start with the whole "state of Texas" bit, I've heard of Stand on Zanzibar. Basically, when things get crowded, fuses get short, and that's an instinct thing more than anything else, so there's no way you can fix this without pushback.
Always on, always spying on what you are doing.
None of this shit (you can add your own expletives here) will come into my home.
No WiFi either. Big thick stone walls really make great radio attenuators so there really is no point.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Borg Big Brother (aka Amazon/Google etc) people. BBB is watching you 24/7. Be careful what you say or do or even think. Remember Winston Smith...
You will obey or be exterminated!
./s /s /s
Detects grunting noises, analyses the low level frequencies, determines too much strain is happening and uses lasers to determine whether you're in the bedroom or the toilet... and then orders some vaseline or suppositories (whichever is appropriate) which is delivered via drone which flies through an open window just as you're finishing.
Not in my house.
Now for well over a year the property through the party wall has been under renovation. This has ranged from drilling/jackhammering which shakes the whole property and frightens my tropical fish to low level rustlings which make me think we have mice (traps are down, one so far).
None of this relates to this property. In apartment buildings how will Alexa determine which property the sound has come from? Another room in the same apartment with a closed door could sound exactly the same as a neighbour, to each side, above or below.
The idea that all homes are hermetically sealed in sonic space is bogus.
@Muscleguy >>>None of this relates to this property. In apartment buildings how will Alexa determine which property the sound has come from? Another room in the same apartment with a closed door could sound exactly the same as a neighbour, to each side, above or below.<<<
They'll all be expected to have one (many?) of these devices producing a complete live 3D soundmap of the entire building back at slurp central. (to go with the live 3D wifi interference map tracking the livestock)
And pay no attention to the faint "tk... tk... tk..." coming continually from the box - it's just pinging the room, trying to echo-locate anyone moving inside. Which is essential information. To Us. For your own protection. From yourself. Oh and don't you worry, the protection of you personal information is "incredibly important" to us...
>>Do press ups exercise routine on the bed<<
And what if they know that the only other people in the house are a bunch of 10yr olds milling around. Will they interpret that as something else entirely?
Blackmail opportunities will be legion.
Apologies for the extreme example.
"Alexa, informed by this model, could in theory hear if you left the water running in your kitchen and might, given the appropriate Alexa Skill, take some action in response, like turning off your smart faucet."
If the only way of telling that a smart faucet is on, is listening for the sound of running water, it doesn't sound terribly smart. Please give us some more brilliant reasons why we should welcome 24/7 audio monitoring of our private living space.
>>>Harrison and his colleagues envision their acoustic model running locally...Companies that can do it on-device will have a competitive edge in the marketplace in my opinion." <<<
I envison this being fully integrated into the existing spy modes and you not getting a bean.
Companies that DON'T do this at all are GUARANTEED first inline for my cash when I buy stuff.
No, you just don't buy the useless fucking products anyway.
I have lived for north of 40 years and never needed an Alexa or whatever device. Having had a friend demonstrate their device to me, I am completely aware I still do not need one of these things.
I used to be one of those techno gadget heads that always had to have the latest gadget. I still like new gadgets, but find myself buying less and less electronic devices as time goes on.
If it uses power, it is probably spying on you.
Alexa, informed by this model, could in theory hear if you left the water running in your kitchen and might, given the appropriate Alexa Skill
Once again someone doesn't understand how these things really work, and wants to impart into them capabilities that they don't really have.
1) Unless you say "Alexa" (or "Amazon", depending on model and configuration) first, the ambient sounds aren't even sent up to Amazon's servers for processing.
2) The "skill" only receives what Amazon's servers decoded in speech to text, they don't receive the raw audio.
Now, that being said, it is certainly possible to hack an Echo with different firmware and make it do something different, but with its underpowered CPU hacking a phone (or just writing and deploying an app without hacking its firmware) would give you access to greater computing horsepower attached to an always-on microphone.
"Hey Siri" or "Ok Google" are a much more likely attack vector.
Your standard household land-line telephone had an always-on microphone. Your cell phone has an always-on microphone. Your bluetooth headset has an always-on microphone.
Just because it has an "always on" microphone doesn't mean that it can do the things they claim. In this case, the author implied that an echo "skill" has direct access to the audio as a background process. That is false, and it isn't how the equipment works.
That is not to say that someone cannot design such a system, just that the system named in the article doesn't have the hardware capabilities attributed to it, and the phone in your pocket is definitely a more attractive target than an echo or google home.
It does have the hardware. It doesn't use hardware to detect 'hello Alexa', it does that in software. The only restriction is that, currently, the owners of the device (note : that's not you) assure us that the sampled sound isn't stored or constantly sent to them. A situation that, even if true, need not remain so.
"Your standard household land-line telephone had an always-on microphone. Your cell phone has an always-on microphone. Your bluetooth headset has an always-on microphone."
Last I checked, the telephone's handset cradle switch is usually mechanical and opens the circuit for either the handset or the phone line (especially for dumb phones since they're powered by the phone line). Either way, an open circuit by definition turns the device off.
The bluetooth headset can't operate without power. Turn the power off or run the battery down and there's no power for the mic.
The cell phone I'll give you since we usually strive to keep it powered.
"Last I checked, the telephone's handset cradle switch is usually mechanical and opens the circuit for either the handset or the phone line (especially for dumb phones since they're powered by the phone line). Either way, an open circuit by definition turns the device off."
When MI5 wanted to bug your phone, they would put a small capacitor across the cradle switch and inject RF, providing enough power to get a signal from the old carbon granule microphone. A friend of my father's, of left wing opinions, used to keep his phone under a pillow for this reason. He also did all the tricks like sticking a couple of hairs down under envelope flaps, putting little wedges in his front door when he went out, all the things later popularised by John Le Carré.
Ah, the great days of low tech spying on citizens.
I can imagine that in the not too distant future, when you are getting frisky with your significant other, a package gets delivered which contains...adult...play toys. Or, have a telemarketer call you to pitch some new IoT connected 'stimulating' device. Um...no thanks. The knowledge of some activities should not be leaving the bedroom.
"Alexa, informed by this model, could in theory hear if you left the water running in your kitchen and might, given the appropriate Alexa Skill, take some action in response, like turning off your smart faucet"
So it's going to use sound to see if you left your smart faucet turned on, at which point it can turn your smart faucet off.
blink
FFS, if it's a fucking SMART FAUCET you would ask the smart faucet if it's on, not use audio!
A really smart faucet [sic] would detect that it had been on for some time, or than the basin was overflowing, and turn itself off.
I don't know why but the word "faucet" annoys me, possibly because there's a three letter word that does the same job and doesn't sound somehow pretentious. It isn't a jaw or a throat, whereas the word "tap" has the right significances - to draw water, to take liquid from a barrel, all from good Germanic roots.
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