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Kit Bashir

@shannonpersists at the time it was pretty much impossible to make a voice assistant without sending audio to the cloud. They listen for a “wake word” but the dirty secret is they are just listening for a pattern of syllables. A-lex-a, hey-si-ri l, oh-Kay-goo-gl. Lots of false triggers. Only just recently have chips gotten good enough to be more discriminatory.

4 February at 0:39 | Open on aus.social
20 comments
Shannon Persists

@Unixbigot Oh ok cuz I had a friend come over and I noticed it kept turning on and it was making me paranoid that Google was spying on me except is it really paranoia if they actually are? 🤔

4 February at 0:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Kit Bashir

@shannonpersists network traffic analysis proves that they aren’t transmitting everything they hear, but if they trigger by accident, they might transmit some words, or even “hallucinate” words from noise like running water, fans, or cat meows.

4 February at 0:44 | Open on aus.social
Shannon Persists
David Zaslavsky

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot And on top of that, the wake word detection system doesn't know your specific voice (at least not until quite recently), so it has to listen for the wake word in many different accents, with or without background noise, whispered close up or shouted from across the room, and so on. People have managed to make these systems quite good, but they do need to cast a fairly broad net, so to speak. Which means there's always going to be some chance that they misinterpret other noises as the wake word.

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot And on top of that, the wake word detection system doesn't know your specific voice (at least not until quite recently), so it has to listen for the wake word in many different accents, with or without background noise, whispered close up or shouted from across the room, and so on. People have managed to make these systems quite good, but they do need to cast a fairly broad net, so to speak. Which means there's always going to be some chance that they misinterpret other...

4 February at 1:00 | Open on techhub.social
Kit Bashir

@diazona @shannonpersists I recently considered getting a custom wakeword. The hardware vendor says they will need at least 20000 recordings from at least 500 speakers of all ages under various (specified) conditions. It would take several weeks to train the model and cost <contact sales> dollars. Reader, I did not contact sales because by that point I suspected the fifty four cents I had to hand would not suffice.

4 February at 1:07 | Open on aus.social
The cat who walks thru walls

@Unixbigot @diazona @shannonpersists Oh, it depends on how skilled a salesdroid you get. You may find yourself happily dancing away waving a signed contract that accepts your 54c... as a first installment.

4 February at 1:16 | Open on oldbytes.space
David Zaslavsky

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists 😂 I suspect you are right.

I used to work at a voice recognition company, and one of the services we offered was custom wakewords. The kinds of clients that took us up on that offer had (many-)multi-million dollar contracts. Of course they were paying for a lot more than the custom wakeword, but the cost of training a wakeword model is definitely substantial.

4 February at 1:21 | Open on techhub.social
Bornach

@Unixbigot @diazona @shannonpersists
This project to man-in-the-middle your voice assistant
electromaker.io/project/view/j
makes use of an off-the-shelf voice recognition module to change the wake word to anything you like

4 February at 7:55 | Open on fosstodon.org
Bornach

@diazona @shannonpersists @Unixbigot
Because of that "fairly broad net" you can "OK, Boomer" your Google Home
youtu.be/PyccNusf5IY

4 February at 7:59 | Open on fosstodon.org
Bornach

@diazona @shannonpersists @Unixbigot
And on top of that on top of that, the microphone most commonly used in home voice assistants itself doesn't know whether it is hearing actually sounds. It could also have been fed the stimulus via a laser beam originating from outside your house.
youtu.be/ozIKwGt38LQ

4 February at 8:12 | Open on fosstodon.org
Shannon Persists

@diazona @Unixbigot Thank you for that information. I choose to suffer in silence.

4 February at 23:49 | Open on mastodon.social
sunflowerinrain

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists I don't have one of these things (having tried them at others' houses it seemed pointless because I'd risk defenestrating it in furious frustration) but if ever I did acquire one it would definitely be taken over by a cat.

4 February at 9:57 | Open on mastodon.online
🔗 David Sommerseth

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot

Any IoT device (Internet connected "thing") has the capability to spy and share the data passing through the device to anyone controlling it - including the device vendor.

If it has a camera or microphone you should always presume you are being spied on. Whether that data leak will be (ab)used or being even remotely interesting is not an important detail. The important detail is that such devices is disturbing your privacy at all times, even in the most intimate moments of your life.

Whenever I am in a room where I'm aware of such devices, I always tend to think twice before sharing my opinion. That is the chilling effect of this.

We are literally living in the world George Orwell described in Nighteen-Eighty Four. But he lacked the imagination of cameras and microphones being in all kind of rooms and devices; not only the telescreens.

And yet the world craves for more interconnected services and devices. It's dystopic.

@shannonpersists @Unixbigot

Any IoT device (Internet connected "thing") has the capability to spy and share the data passing through the device to anyone controlling it - including the device vendor.

If it has a camera or microphone you should always presume you are being spied on. Whether that data leak will be (ab)used or being even remotely interesting is not an important detail. The important detail is that such devices is disturbing your privacy at all times, even in the most intimate moments of your life.

4 February at 11:55 | Open on infosec.exchange
Soozcat

@Unixbigot @shannonpersists A while back I liked to ask the Amazon smart speaker to play the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster Alexa." It would start, say the name of the song, hear itself say the wake word and stop to wait for a command. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think they've fixed it now, but it made for a fun little party trick.

7 February at 2:22 | Open on vmst.io
Kit Bashir

@Soozcat @shannonpersists hahaha tell me you employ nobody who bought Stormfront without etc…

7 February at 2:27 | Open on aus.social
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