Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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If it's all as benign as tacit has implied, why doesn't Samsung flat-out say so? They did, in pretty much the same way Apple addressed similar accusations about iPhone localization tracking etc. in the past ( scroll down to 'voice recognition'). I’m sure they’ll do more to explain things, just as I’m sure that there will be many people who’ll continue to believe what they like to believe, regardless of ‘the facts’. Still the issue is an increasingly important one, but one that goes beyond the mere sending of potentially sensitive data to ‘third parties’.
alternaut ◉ moderator
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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You don't generally roll your own high quality offsite voice processing and recognition. You farm it out to someone else. Apple is a bit of an exception, since they more-or-less pioneered offsite VR. In fact Apple bought out another company to get their VR technology so it could be used in Siri and Dictate. Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking is just about the only surviving VR that actually runs on a Mac or PC and that requires a lot of "training" to get acceptably accurate translation and can cost anywhere from $150 to $999 depending on the extent of the vocabulary. (That cost includes the headset microphone needed to get the best voice quality for VR.)
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
— Albert Einstein
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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In fact Apple bought out another company to get their VR technology so it could be used in Siri and Dictate. but that "other company" wasn't doing offsite VR were they?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Thanks for putting that quote back into its context and clearing up at least the immediate issue. Edit: Is instructing a TV so complicated that a very basic, multi-user piece of built-in software with a minimal number of preset (only) commands couldn't do the job? (The last TV I owned was a 12" B&W over 30 years ago; I'm not quite up to date. )
Last edited by artie505; 02/12/15 09:07 PM.
The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.
In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Edit: Is instructing a TV so complicated that a very basic, multi-user piece of built-in software with a minimal number of preset (only) commands couldn't do the job? The issue emerged with the advent of Samsung’s audio-capable smart remotes, which allow the user to speak commands in a way Siri users are familiar with. This functionality requires processing beyond the TV’s (or iPhones’) capabilities, a problem solved by remotely processing the requests. This solution gave rise to the privacy problem, perceived or not.
alternaut ◉ moderator
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Edit: Is instructing a TV so complicated that a very basic, multi-user piece of built-in software with a minimal number of preset (only) commands couldn't do the job? (The last TV I owned was a 12" B&W over 30 years ago; I'm not quite up to date. ) The trick, whether it is instructing a television set, or dictating the "Great American Novel" is not so much in recognizing a limited command set as it is in being able to correctly interpret the various regional, racial, ethnic, native language accents, pronunciation, intonations, voice patterns, [i]etc//i]. Even gender can make a difference. AFIK Dragon Naturally Speaking is about the only consumer grade VR software that runs on a Mac or PC and it costs anywhere from $150 to $999 depending on the complexity of the vocabulary.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
— Albert Einstein
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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The trick, whether it is instructing a television set, or dictating the "Great American Novel" is not so much in recognizing a limited command set as it is in being able to correctly interpret the various regional, racial, ethnic, native language accents, pronunciation, intonations, voice patterns, etc//i]. Even gender can make a difference. AFIK Dragon Naturally Speaking is about the only consumer grade VR software that runs on a Mac or PC and it costs anywhere from $150 to $999 depending on the complexity of the vocabulary. I understand the problem with Siri, which you're liable to ask virtually anything, but I was thinking that the command set for a TV is limited enough that minimal, built-in, multi-user software with ([i]) " n" commands, and " this" is how each user speaks each one, would make remote access, even interpretation, unnecessary.
The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.
In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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OP
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Samsung has clarified its terms and conditions to say that it has a contract with a voice recognition company called Nuance Communications, Inc to handle its voice recognition. This si the "third party" that gets access to the spoken commands for the TV. The problem with doing the VR on the device is that even if you have only a limited set of spoken commands, you still have to process all the speech you hear in order to figure out whether it contains any of those commands. That, as it turns out, is surprisingly tricky to do. The processing power scales not with the number of commands but rather with how flexible you want to be in recognizing them--it's one thing to recognize a dozen words from a single person in a quiet room with no background noise after training, and quite another to recognize a dozen words spoken by anyone in any pitch or accent in a place with variable background noise. A lot of the processing happens before you even get to the point of recognizing the words--removing noise, normalizing frequency, that sort of thing.
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Thanks for the explanation.
I was thinking "little", in the sense that each user would say "user n", followed by "up", "down", or "sideways"...speaking clearly, and, hopefully, in a room that's not very noisy, i.e. virtually zero flexibility required.
Hardly high-tech, but it still seems possible.
Even if there were some dollar cost involved aside from the "overhead", I'll guess that many would pay to avoid the alternative.
The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.
In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Samsung has clarified its terms and conditions to say that it has a contract with a voice recognition company called Nuance Communications, Inc to handle its voice recognition. This si the "third party" that gets access to the spoken commands for the TV. FYI Nuance Communications is the developer of Dragon Naturally Speaking that I mentioned. Several years ago there were dozens of developers, including IBM with its very deep pockets and massive computing power, working on natural language voice recognition and spending many millions on developing the technology. The field has since narrowed down to a very few and rather than becoming more common and less expensive such systems remain uncommon and very expensive. A testament to the difficulty of the task. Dragon Naturally Speaking requires hours to train the software to recognize the speakers voice patterns and the speaker must learn to speak in a way the software understands and at that 90% accuracy is considered average comprehension.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
— Albert Einstein
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Can we really trust the NSA? Will they surreptitiously do bulk collections of metadata without authorization? How will we know? National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata collection program to sunset on June 1
Jon
macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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OP
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If by "trust" you mean "an accurate belief in the actions of another," I think we can trust the NSA. We can trust them to collect data wherever and however they can, with or without authorization. I think we can count on them to operate with casual disregard for the law. I think we can trust them to continue doing exactly what they've been doing even if the legal pretext they had for doing it is no longer available. So in that sense, do I trust them? Absolutely. I have high confidence I can reliably predict what they're going to do.
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Can we really trust the NSA? I have to agree with tacit. But on the chance of sounding political, things also depend on your point of view. Where it wasn’t expertly ambiguous, the NSA has proven to be reliably unreliable in its public comments on its activities, so the answer for the public has to be: absolutely not. From the point of view of government agencies tasked with ‘maintaining’ national security, the answer may very well be: absolutely! I strongly suspect that the ‘philosophy’ underlying surreptitious activities without authorization won’t change, and if it isn’t one argument that supposedly justifies it, it’ll be another. Again, and for good or for bad, the only thing you can be sure of is that no official answer to any such question will ever be fully trustworthy, reliable or complete. Unfortunately, you don’t need to be a conspiracy buff to feel that way. Btw, that also applies to sunset provisions in national security related legislation. They are somewhat of a boondoggle, since they have rarely if ever worked as the public is led to believe. History shows that such laws don’t ’expire’ but tend to get back on the books by majority votes, with the tacit understanding that if ever something happens that just might have been prevented by the laws in question, the blame would squarely fall on those who vote(d) against it. So rather than reassure, such provisions should give one pause.
alternaut ◉ moderator
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Can we really trust the NSA? with the tacit understanding Pun intended?
Jon
macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Yes? (Sufficiently ambiguous?)
alternaut ◉ moderator
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Re: Son of Snowden: It keeps getting worse
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Jon
macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
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