Group items tagged

"- Most notably, the Echo Show 5 has a mechanical slide that lets you close the shutter on its front-facing camera, something that previous Echo Shows didn't have. ... -One of the new privacy features from Amazon is the "Alexa Privacy Hub," a kind of one-stop shop on the web for all Alexa-related privacy settings. Amazon says this is where users will go to manage their own privacy settings by time frame and by device. ... -And you can now use voice control to clear Alexa's equivalent of your browsing history. ... [...] these tools still put the burden of responsibility largely on the customer."

> 2019 Voice report: Consumer adoption of voice technology and digital assistants https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/2019-voice-report "Forty-one percent of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy and passive listening, according to a new report from Microsoft focused on consumer adoption of voice and digital assistants. And perhaps people should be concerned - all the major voice assistants, including those from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung, as well as Microsoft, employ humans who review the voice data collected from end users."

"A glimmer of hope at CES 2019 came in the form of a new open-source virtual assistant called Mycroft that promises never to collect your personal data. CNet notes that it's still in early development, and it may never challenge Google Assistant or Alexa in general intelligence. But at least the device shows that some in the tech world are starting to regard privacy as a core feature of virtual assistants, rather than an afterthought."

"First, when you ask questions like "Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?" the Assistant will share information about how we keep your data private and secure. We're also making it easier to control your privacy with simple voice commands. In the coming weeks, you'll be able to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account just by saying things like "Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you" or "Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week." You won't need to turn on any of these features-they will work automatically when you ask the Assistant for help. If you ask to delete more than a week's worth of data from your account, the Assistant will point you directly to the page in your account settings to complete the deletion. We're rolling this out in English next week, and in all other languages next month."

"The creator of the famous voice assistant dreams of a world where Alexa is everywhere, anticipating your every need." "The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before." "From a technical perspective, all this would be an incredible achievement. " "From a consumer's perspective, however, these changes also have critical privacy implications. " "Prasad's vision effectively assumes Alexa will follow you everywhere, know a fair bit about what you're up to at any given moment, and be the primary interface for how you coordinate your life. At a baseline, this requires hoovering up enormous amounts of intimate details about your life. Some worry that Amazon will ultimately go far beyond that baseline by using your data to advertise and market to you. "This is ultimately about monetizing the daily lives of individuals and groups of people," says Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer privacy advocacy organization based in Washington, DC."

"At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a boost to the artificial intelligence (AI) that allows smart speakers like the Echo, Google Home, and Apple Homepod to reliably recognize everyday sounds-and to act on them-is set to lend the devices powerful new capabilities, including the ability to recognize your favorite brands from the noises they make." "Are such activities an invasion of your "soundspace"? Schaub thinks so. He predicts, "People will find the detection of what kind of soft drink they are having, based on the sound of opening the can or bottle, very creepy." "That people are unaware their smart speakers could record activity after the device's wake word is uttered is no surprise to Schaub and his fellow researchers. Their survey of smart speaker users showed that consumer rationalizations for installing smart speakers showed "an incomplete understanding of privacy risks" and that they had a misplaced "trust relationship" with the smart speaker companies. Most users, the researchers said, seemed resigned to losing their privacy and accepted it as a cost of using the technology." "Still, voice assistant makers should harbor no illusions that audio data is any less worthy of protection than other forms of data, says a spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in London, which drew up of many of the measures in the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which companies the world over now have to comply with if they want to sell into Britain or Europe."

"We need some new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the rotten trade-off we now make between privacy and AI. The good news is that there's a growing research effort in what's called "privacy-preserving" machine learning. Academics are trying to develop algorithms that can operate on encrypted data, which means they wouldn't need to access anyone's data directly. Other researchers are figuring out ways to combine insights from different machine-­learning models without needing to merge all their underlying data. Companies like Apple, ­Google, and Microsoft already have teams working on such projects."

"At its annual developer conference in Mountain View, Google boasted of shrinking its speech recognition software to 1/25th of its prior size. CEO Sundar Pichai called that a "milestone" because it means software that traditionally lives in Google's cloud servers can be installed in Pixel smartphones Google will launch later this year, allowing the devices to respond to a person's voice much more quickly." "Werner Goertz, a research director at Gartner, calls the shift to on-device speech recognition "game changing" and potentially a significant challenge to Apple's and Amazon's more conventional speech systems. "Latency has always been an issue," he said, and most users have experienced the problem." "Processing speech on-device instead of transmitting it to the cloud can also be more private than the conventional model-although in some cases the transcribed text will be sent to Google anyway. Pichai and other executives made privacy a theme of Tuesday's event, gently trying to neutralize Google's reputation for data-slurping. The company showcased redesigned privacy settings, and a new "incognito mode" for Google Maps that pauses the service's default tracking of a device's movements."

"Dr. Lam is collaborating with a group of Stanford faculty members and students to build a virtual assistant that would allow individuals and corporations to avoid surrendering personal information as well as retain a degree of independence from giant technology companies." ... "The Stanford researchers are hoping to gain support by making their software freely available to users of smartphones, computers and consumer appliances. They are encouraging makers of consumer products to connect their devices to the Almond virtual assistant through a Wikipedia-style service they call Thingpedia. It is a shared database in which any manufacturer or internet service could specify how its product or service would interact with the Almond virtual assistant."

Passionnant décryptage du CTO de Snips... depuis Siri à aujourd'hui... décryptage de la technologie autour des assistants vocaux, cas d'usages, fantasmes... Interface vocale, la technologie existe depuis 30 ans (médecins, call center...), "interface" remplacée par "assistant" (promesse de l'IA) + promesse d'un dialogue naturel... Limites : la voix ne sert pas à tout, besoin d'un écran quand on a une recherche plus précise à faire... ex: est-ce à l'usager de s'adapter à l'interface ? = > formulation de l'intention... Briques techniques d'un assistant vocal : - banc de micros (détection de la source, triangulation pour mieux capter la source de son) - wakeword pour réveiller l'assistant (machine learning = écoute le signal en permanence mais entre en écoute active à partir du "wakeword", la reconnaissance vocale est alors lancée qui a pour objectif de transcrire ce que l'utilisateur a dit) - NLU : natural language understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-language_understanding prend le texte en entrée ("la météo demain à Bordeaux ?") et sort un objet structuré : intention : météo, quand : demain soir, où : bordeaux même fonctionnement qu'un chatbot - Logique d'action (comment réagir à la demande de l'utilisateur ?) :ce sont les développeurs qui travaillent cette dernière partie + synthèse vocale pour donner la réponse Snips travaille les étapes "wakeword" + "NLU" logique d'action (cf. modèle app store) avec 16000 développeurs + synthèse vocale : sous-traitance secteurs : bureau, habitat, véhicule, industrie Privacy / snips : le son ne sort pas du "salon" - sortie prévue fin 2019 petit réseau de neurones pour le "wakeword" tourne en embarqué pour toutes les solutions (amazon, google...)... mais il y a un taux d'erreur (de une fois par heure à une fois par jour)... donc

A US podcast about "Yann Lachelle, COO at Snips, about the privacy by design alternative to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa."

"Project Alias serves as a gatekeeper between you and big corporations. It effectively deafens the home assistant when you don't want it listening, and brings it to life when you do." "The speaker sounds like a white noise machine to the assistant, covering your speech with an inaudible, omnipresent static. That is, until the software side comes into play. You can train the Alias through local machine learning (no cloud here!) to learn how to wake the assistant to a unique keyword, disabling the static." "When you utter your chosen word, it prompts the Alias to whisper, "Hey Google," to activate the assistant. And then Alias goes quiet, allowing you to communicate with Google or Amazon as you normally would."

"-Smart speakers are not broadly useful-most users only use them for a few things-music, timers, alarms, and, in some cases, home automation scenarios. - Voice-only situations are limiting in cases where a visual or hybrid mode is required - media, entertainment, shopping, etc. - Engagement levels with third-party skills are very low (skills offer limited functionality and skills syntax is hard to remember). "I'm sorry, I don't know that" and other Alexa failures are no longer entertaining, but rather frustrating. Even Amazon acknowledges this [https://www.tomsguide.com/us/amazon-alexa-kills-skills,news-28072.html] - Smart speakers are NOT ubiquitous-the speaker on my kitchen counter is not in my car nor in my office!" "Apps - do we need to reinvent the wheel?" "Most people already have their banking, communications, social networking, navigation, travel and payment apps in their smartphones. They already know how to use them (simple). They already know which ones to use for what purpose-Slack for work, WhatsApp for friends, Messenger for family (user choice). They've already registered and set them up and they provide control over what information goes where-for instance, their portfolio may be in their banking app, their contacts are on the phone. They know which app sees what data (privacy). They also trust apps to protect them and their data. Imagine a voice assistant platform that just allows users to use the apps they already use-on-the-go - anytime, anywhere-with simple voice commands, without having to register these service relationships again, and without waiting for the developers to have to reinvent the wheel to plug into the platform. We must embrace mobile app actions as first-class citizens. We should be able to do things in our mobile apps with simple voice commands. We must provide user choice and personalize user experience without registration and without compromising privacy and trust."

"If voicebots provide value, then consumers will not hesitate to use them. [...] But convenience isn't one-sided. It has to be equally convenient for the business and for the consumer. And there are many underlying social, moral and legal implications to consider as this technology matures in support of that balance. How do you ensure a voicebot behaves ethically? How do you prevent inflection and sentiment analysis being deployed to manipulate people during a bot conversation? What do bots do with the information consumers provide? Will they remember credit card numbers? Where does information go? How is it stored? Who and what else can access it? There are severe privacy implications too. In Europe, for example, voicebots must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (which came into force last year)." [...] "And businesses deploying voicebots also had better be prepared for the hefty weight of user expectation. As humans, we are biologically wired to recognize voices and instinctively recall what we can do with the associated persona. " [...] "Even though voicebots are soon going to be everywhere, we are not going to be comfortable talking to them all the time. They will have utility, and they will be more convenient for quick queries and simple tasks. But, being able to talk with a real person about messy human matters has value that a bot can never be trained to manage completely and infallibly. "

"Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands. " "In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa "lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter." But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching." "In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don't provide a user's full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user's first name and the device's serial number." "Apple's Siri also has human helpers, who work to gauge whether the digital assistant's interpretation of requests lines up with what the person said. The recordings they review lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier, according to an Apple security white paper. After that, the data is stripped of its random identification information but may be stored for longer periods to improve Siri's voice recognition. At Google, some reviewers can access some audio snippets from its Assistant to help train and improve the product, but it's not associated with any personally identifiable information and the audio is distorted, the company says. "

"From this week, the voice-assisted technology is automatically searching the NHS Choices website when UK users ask for health-related advice. The Department of Health in England said it could reduce demand on the NHS. Privacy campaigners have raised data protection concerns but Amazon say all information will be kept confidential." "The use of voice search is on the increase and is seen as particularly beneficial to vulnerable patients, such as elderly people and those with visual impairment, who may struggle to access the internet through more traditional means."

"Most often, they ask them to play their favorite songs, tell jokes, and sometimes, to do their homework. Of course, chatting with a bot comes with privacy concerns." "Those concerns have created a market for voice assistants that are more kid-friendly and less nosy, such as Chatterbox, a DIY AI for kids, and Toniebox, an entertainment-focused smart speaker that sells in privacy-friendly Europe."

"The AI sausage that voice technology relies on gets made in a feedback loop: The products perform well enough, voice data from customers are collected and used to improve the service, more people buy in to the product as it improves, and then more data are collected, improving it further. This loop requires a large customer base to sustain itself, which raises the question: Would as many people have bought these products if they knew that Romanian contract workers would listen to them, even if they didn't deliberately trigger their devices? " "In a recent article for The New Yorker on the risks of automation, the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain coined the phrase intellectual debt: the phenomenon by which we readily accept new technology into our lives, only bothering to learn how it works after the fact. Essentially, buy first, ask questions later." "But privacy alone won't solve this. It's just as important for consumers to know how our devices work to begin with."

> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/08/improving-siris-privacy-protections/ «Nous n'avons pas respecté nos propres idéaux, et pour cela nous nous excusons», écrit la marque dans un communiqué. «Nous avons déjà suspendu notre programme et il ne reprendra qu'après un certain nombre de changements.» Parmi ces derniers, les enregistrements des utilisateurs de Siri ne seront plus conservés par défaut. Il sera également demandé explicitement aux utilisateurs s'ils acceptent, ou non, que des extraits de leur voix soit utilisé pour améliorer le logiciel. Enfin, seuls les employés d'Apple seront désormais autorisés à écouter ces enregistrements. D'après le Guardian , au moins 300 personnes, travaillant pour des entreprises sous-traitantes en Irlande, ont perdu leur contrat suite à ces révélations.

"Parental supervision via voice assistant won't be limited to what happens at home. Amazon announced that it will roll out new Alexa education skills in partnership with education tech companies like Blackboard, Canvas, and Coursera. Students, and their parents, will shortly be able to ask Alexa about homework or for updates posted by teachers on those platforms to stay up to date on classroom activities." "Amazon wants to increase its market share among children, and make them loyal to the voice assistant at an early age. But with children, parents are the gatekeepers. It remains to be seen if the family-friendly features and increased transparency are enough for parents to trust Alexa interacting with their children after the many privacy breaches. If successful, it could set the template for how voice assistant developers approach the market for the younger audience. Still, there's no guarantee any of it will be enough to appease worried parents or head off the kind of regulation Amazon and other voice assistant makers want to limit."