[HN Gopher] I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to proce...
___________________________________________________________________
I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the
information
Author : roberdam
Score : 551 points
Date : 2022-11-15 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (roberdam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (roberdam.com)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| This is known as life logging with adjacency to sousveillance and
| it's a fascinating topic.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
|
| We in general don't want to be watched by others, but a managed
| record of our own activities can be extremely valuable, and even
| more so if you find yourself wrongly accused. Further it can be
| used to shine a light on corrupt officials, one example of this
| is the nycplacards exposes on twitter.
| manholio wrote:
| The trouble with any such footage is that it can be used
| against you ("as the the defendant's own records show, they
| were present in the murder area") but they generally won't
| extricate you when produced by you, since you clearly have a
| motivation to use it selectively. So you showing a picture of
| yourself reading a book during what you claim is the murder
| night is not an alibi, because it could have been produced at
| any other time, and you will have a massive uphill battle in
| the court to authenticate that image, and risk even sink you
| further if you fail ("the defendant even prepared an alibi").
|
| The only way I would accept a commercial product performing
| this always-on archiving is if:
|
| 1. It's encrypted by default with a strong key that can't be
| subpoenaed or circumvented.
|
| 2. The encoder generates its own random key upon installation
| which I don't know (recoding effectively random, undecodable
| data), and I then have to manually change the key if I expect
| to ever read the recording.
|
| Number 1 allows me to review and footage and only release it if
| it's in my interest, and number 2 affords me plausible
| deniability, if I don't release the key I can claim I did not
| know you need to set it manually.
|
| Sure, as long as you are the only nerd doing this, you don't
| need this complex setup, and you will probably get to use it
| the unencrypted footage only in your favor. But when it becomes
| widely accepted as a social norm (say, everyone wearing Google
| glasses), you can expect law enforcement will become aware of
| it as a cheap source of self-incriminatory evidence.
| Jach wrote:
| Why not just have the device occasionally send sha256 sums of
| chunks to a third party service, like Twitter tweets, where
| it's clear you can't forge the date of the message? If you
| need to produce some chunks, the matching hashes provide an
| independent time stamp showing you didn't just produce the
| content at any time. This sort of trick is already commonly
| done to demonstrate prior knowledge of something at a later
| point in time without having to reveal it just yet (if ever).
| ramblerman wrote:
| Great idea, but are courts tech savvy enough to accept this
| already?
|
| Even with a tech expert to explain it, I worry the
| opposition would just get their own expert and make a whole
| mess of it, confusing both the judge and jury enough to
| cast doubt.
|
| Perhaps I have a very wrong view on how both such evidence
| is presented and accepted though.
| Jach wrote:
| Courts are generally more tech savvy than techies like to
| give them credit for. But it's worth mentioning that in
| recent years several US states have already passed
| legislation expressly forbidding courts from denying such
| evidence (even/especially if put on Blockchains rather
| than a more traditional non-decentralized
| network/database), and you can find similar stuff in
| other countries around the world (even China). And of
| course in lower courts (like small claims) or even
| mediation the standards are a lot looser, there's not
| even a jury.
|
| If you want a more thorough view of the rules in the US
| (which states deviate from to some extent), you might
| like to browse https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I'd be interested in knowing of any cases where someone who
| recorded their own activities used it as an alibi. Right now
| it's all theoretical. Dash cams are really strong evidence in
| traffic court, but this isn't criminal so it has a lower bar.
| From the other end, body cam footage is powerful when worn by
| police, and cell phone evidence by bystanders are also strong
| evidence.
| manholio wrote:
| The body cam footage is a good example, it's deeply hated
| by the police and a frequent source of incriminatory
| evidence against the wearer.
|
| Since "you got nothing to hide", as the old saying goes,
| why not bodycam yourself and offer the authorities a great
| source of evidence they can use against yourself?
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Bodycams are actually an example of a reform successfully
| cooped by police bureaucracy.
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/05/16/police-pr-video-
| machi...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The American Jurors have convicted people based on a
| man's interpretation of a dog signalling that a dead body
| was on someone's property 5 years ago. Once people are
| that gulliable, they are beyond help.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/should-dog-s-
| sniff-b...
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Keep in mind that they're in an artificial environment
| designed to lead them to that decision. One of the
| judge's jobs is to ensure experts are appropriately
| qualified. Another of the judge's jobs is to restrict
| what the jury is allowed to hear.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| "A jury of your peers consists of 12 people who were not
| smart enough to get out of jury duty."
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I think that's right, it's a double edged sword. You
| would have to ask if you're more likely to be wrongly
| accused or to be caught doing something wrong by your own
| recordings.
|
| This guy has been recording himself publicly since 2002
| after ending up on a no fly list.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_M._Elahi
|
| I think that's taking it too far and would rather encrypt
| than publish it publicly, but doing it publicly does
| strengthen the alibi
| iudqnolq wrote:
| You're missing an option: Wrongly accused on the basis of
| your own recordings. Imagine this real life situation
| occured, but it was your own recordings instead of
| surveillance cameras
|
| > A key piece of evidence in the case is video
| surveillance footage showing Williams' car stopped on the
| 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m.--
| the time and location where police say they know Herring
| was shot.
|
| > How did they know that's where the shooting happened?
| Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses
| hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and
| location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time
| and place.
|
| (The defense argued ShotSpotter makes up data and hides
| behind opaque AI they refuse to rigorously test. Instead
| of responding, the prosecution dropped the case.)
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-
| telling-sh...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If I follow, the police would need access to the
| recordings to make the case, which would mean at least
| probable cause for a warrant. If Herring had a camera or
| mic on him running at the time of the shooting wouldn't
| that contradict shotspotter? It seems more likely any
| data you have would create doubt rather than bolster the
| police case.
|
| In general, the shotspotter and surveillance cameras
| already exist, so what do you have to counteract that?
| Doing things like leaving no paper trail because you pay
| everything in cash, or no location data because you keep
| your phone in airplane mode, leaves little crumbs for
| your defense, and may create the appearance of hiding
| something.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > If I follow, the police would need access to the
| recordings to make the case, which would mean at least
| probable cause for a warrant.
|
| PC is a very low bar.
|
| > In general, the shotspotter and surveillance cameras
| already exist, so what do you have to counteract that
|
| It's not binary. Lots of areas, including the inside of
| your house, probably aren't covered by surveillance
| cameras.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Time is really critical. Alot of police investigative work
| is about stitching camera footage together in a timeline.
|
| I served on a jury where a case was built around camera
| evidence immediately before and after an event. Of about a
| dozen relevant data sources, only one had verifiable,
| correct time. The defense was able to impeach that
| evidence, and the whole case collapsed. A dude got away
| with manslaughter.
| RobRivera wrote:
| I had an awful breakup with a woman with tortuous tendencies
| and a false sense of how to abuse personal injury law and she
| keeps google home devices and car devices recording
| practically every moment of her life. as well as apple watch
| broadcasting her location at all times.
|
| I observed she would always accuse me of things i never did
| in front of these cameras to get me to give false
| confessions. thankfully i am as blissfully honest to all
| people i meet, sometimes to my own detriment, so i never
| admit to fabricated stories.
|
| given that context, can you point me to judicial precedents
| where plaintiffs had their self provided footage weakend due
| to the idea of fabricating false narratives with devices,
| selectively natrowing contexts etc.
| [deleted]
| stcredzero wrote:
| _a managed record of our own activities can be extremely
| valuable_
|
| I've thought of this as a hardware product: A device that
| records your own voice and non vocal sounds, but which does not
| record the words of others. (That, plus maybe location and a
| video stream, provided one is in a location without "a
| reasonable expectation of privacy.")
|
| Perhaps it doesn't even have to be hardware at this point!
| Maybe this could be installed as an app on an older smartphone?
| hirundo wrote:
| > Further it can be used to shine a light on corrupt officials
|
| Little Brother surveillance. It would be nice not to be
| surveilled at all, but since that's not an option the answer to
| "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is us.
| thingification wrote:
| In times past, it was obvious that it wasn't an option to
| avoid pervasive violence (by orders of magnitude compared to
| today).
|
| It was, though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Also it was obviois that ut wasnt an option to avoid
| pervasive slavery.
|
| Or a class system where lords and kings have more right
| than you do, although we are kinda bringing that back.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| Who watches the watchmen? The watched.
| rzzzt wrote:
| How many Watchmans would a watchman watch if watchmen could
| watch Watchmans?
| ben_w wrote:
| None, because justice is blind ;)
| pards wrote:
| I think the passive part of this could be really interesting -
| starting with a simple "tag cloud" of keywords by frequency
| linking to audio snippets that mention them, it'd provide a way
| to index conversations during the day for future reference (or
| processing).
| roberdam wrote:
| indeed, that I guess will be the best part of the expermient,
| but the longer one.
| tim-fan wrote:
| Further to indexing conversations, it would be
| interesting/helpful to be able to pull out: *
| conversation length * participants * location
|
| So you could search for, say, that long conversation I had in
| the park with Bob.
|
| I'm not sure how easy it is to identify/track different
| participants in a conversation.
|
| Edit:formatting
| frontman1988 wrote:
| The future will definitely have devices which record
| visually/verbally all your life. VR headsets are already able to
| record all your facial expressions. A google glasses like gear
| which records all your life is pretty much possible in the near
| future. The future influencers won't have to carry a phone/camera
| to create vlogs, they would just see wherever they want and the
| glasses will record not only the thing they are seeing but also
| their expressions. Privacy will probably not be such a big thing
| as now given most people with each generation are increasingly
| becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives
| online.
| trekkie1024 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of
| You." Could be pretty scary if misused.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| I've thought for 20 years that the Life Recorder is inevitable.
| I figured it would be like journaling constantly, getting
| insight and guidance to improve.
|
| Now I think it will result in unbearable self-consciousness.
| You will yearn to be offline, quiet, to just forget, maybe to
| enjoy the moment without it going in your permanent history.
|
| Arguments in relationships are messed up when you can rewind
| and debate what he said she said. The actual words are often
| not important, it's the emotions. The permanent record makes it
| harder to forgive and move on. It's like being in court,
| everything transcribed.
|
| > given most people with each generation are increasingly
| becoming more and more comfortable sharing their whole lives
| online.
|
| There is an entire generation who learned not to post, many who
| are very anti social media, many who stay anonymous. Chat is
| much bigger than public social these days.
|
| There are also scenes that avoid digital. They make cassette
| music and black and white photocopy artwork.
| yannyu wrote:
| Ted Chiang explores this idea in a short story called "The
| Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling"
| (https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-
| of-...), which takes place in a world where commercial,
| individual, always-on recording exists. Ted Chiang also wrote
| the short story that the movie Arrival was based on.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Halperin's debut novel _The Truth Machine_ also has people
| living "documented lives", with always-on video and audio
| recording, as a primary plot element.
| oliwary wrote:
| As does the Neanderthal parallax by Robert J. Sawyer [0].
| It describes an advanced civilization of Neanderthals who
| have taken completely different societal choices. IIRC,
| each neanderthal has a recording device that constantly
| films and uploads a 3D feed of their surroundings. In case
| of murder, the court can access this recording to determine
| find the killer.
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| After reading The Circle, I'll definitely pass on sharing my
| whole live online.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| > Privacy will probably not be such a big thing as now given
| most people with each generation are increasingly becoming more
| and more comfortable sharing their whole lives online
|
| That's not quite right. People are just unaware of the power of
| what they share and usually react quite negatively if their
| data is used against them and start shielding themselves from
| surveillance of the sort that might affect them.
|
| So predicting "people won't care about privacy because they
| share their whole lives online more and more" is a bit
| disingenuous.
|
| It's what the tech companies like Facebook want but it's far
| from the truth.
| feanaro wrote:
| I predict future generations (maybe even those being born right
| now) to start moving away from recording and uploading
| everything as it's the uncool thing their parents are doing.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| Current gen Tiktokers ran away from facebook and instagram,
| not from oversharing on social media. I think teens will
| always be very active on some kind of social media, but yes
| one can certainly hope that all of it is seen in some
| negative light by the coming generations.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I'm not sure people are increasingly willing to share their
| whole _actual_ lives online, they are mostly presenting a
| curated and tailored image of themselves to project the self
| that they want the world to see. 24 /7 straight-to-internet
| type recording doesn't serve that goal very well. I'm not sure
| that something like this would be popular among streamers,
| other than maybe a small niche for who that is their whole
| thing.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| All of the rooms/corridors in my house except my bathrooms are
| covered by cameras. My initial motivation for installing them was
| to keep an eye on what my pets were doing when I'm not around,
| but I find in recent years that if I misplace something, I end up
| tracing back my history on the cameras and finding where I left
| it.
|
| It seems obvious that at some point, AI will be able to do that
| for me and I'll just be able to say "Alexa, where did I leave my
| glasses?", "Hey Google, where did I put my box of spare fuses?".
| relaxing wrote:
| Just having a front door cam paid off immensely this year when
| I was able to prove that I had left the house with an item
| (that I later misplaced, and was able to recover with that
| knowledge.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Nah, is it much more efficient to distract you into loosing
| your box of fuses and manipulate you into buying new ones.
|
| Alexa AI doesn't work for you, it's a hired gun in your house.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Just like 2001: A Space Odyssey - but instead of Hal trying
| to kill me, it just tries to get me to buy things I don't
| need.
|
| "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave, not until you watch this
| advert"
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Wish they'd at least release a Christopher Walken package.
|
| "I can...NOT find your ANswer."
| ysavir wrote:
| When you do, can you invite me over to show me how it works?
| Then I'll test it for "Alexa, in which mattress does cameronh90
| keep their savings?".
| oh_sigh wrote:
| "Voice not recognized. Releasing the robotic attack dogs"
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Like pretty much everyone in my country, I already entrust a
| bunch of private corporations to safeguard my wealth. Worse,
| there's nothing to stop my bank from suddenly deciding
| tomorrow that I don't have any money, and I don't really have
| any paper records to prove otherwise...
|
| I figure any AI advanced enough to monitor everything I'm
| doing and where all my stuff is, is probably smart enough to
| know if it's me asking.
| bhawks wrote:
| I agree that it is an obvious extension for AI to use this data
| at scale to help users. It also is obviously a huge temptation
| to abuse it for other purposes.
|
| Wasting a few minutes in the morning to find my glasses is a
| small price to pay to not be watched and analyzed all the time.
| Let's not build our own panopticons.
| xcambar wrote:
| I would 100% prefer to lose my keys rather than letting Amazon
| or Google in.
|
| FYI: I have zero Alexa/Siri enabled device, zero automated home
| device, a degoogled phone, etc etc. So we might have different
| perspectives on the matter.
| daveidol wrote:
| Curious: are you concerned about data leaks or you don't
| trust the employees to not access your user data? Or
| something else?
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Not who you asked but: I'm afraid of the data being stored
| and available to anybody. As long as it's out there, the
| government can compel others to give it to them; and
| companies can get acquired and structures and laws can
| change in such a way that the data gets in others hands
| perfectly legally.
|
| Thus, I should only be okay with it if I'm okay with the
| "nothing to hide" argument, which I'm not.
| xcambar wrote:
| Both and more. Having my data sold to 3rd parties is an
| obvious first. And if you think the terms of service are
| enough to cover you, see how fast they can change in
| everyday life and please reconsider. Plus, data can be sold
| pseudo-anonymously and build up a profile against which
| your identity is compared and metered, as in, for example,
| health insurance risks or crime potential.
|
| Additionally, we, the consumers, have lost the right to own
| things. Or at least, if we do own things, it comes with all
| sorts of strings attached in the form of "features" or
| "connectivity". Which is just marketing lingo to say that
| you're feeding the cash cow.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yes, yes, and I don't like anything home automation to be
| dependant on anything cloud. Enhancing function is fine but
| house that stops working right the moment internet link is
| down is a dystopia.
| leobabauta wrote:
| "Dystopia" seems like a stronger word than applies here.
| gmadsen wrote:
| i mean you could always run a home server for the automated
| home things. heating/ac and lights are nice things to
| automate
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Because spending tens of thousands of dollars in home
| infrastructure to avoid fiddling with the thermostat four
| times a year definitely makes sense.
| omvtam wrote:
| I inherited a 1980's model AC/Furnace and controlling the
| AC at least is extremely simple and cheap. A 12V relay in
| the compressor housing activating the 220V switch,
| connected to another relay controlled by a Pi zero which
| is controlled by yet another PI zero with a $10 DHT 22. A
| bash script check the temp and activates the compressor
| via SSh when the temp goes above 74F. The furnace control
| hasn't died yet so I haven't bothered replacing it.
| Putting the cooling system on IoT total cost = ~ $100
| karaterobot wrote:
| What if you charged someone to build and install the same
| system in their house? You'd probably charge a lot more
| than $100, and that's what the real cost would be for
| most people.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Nobody has suggested professional installation though,
| the original suggestion was just a nice home automatic
| project to play with.
| progman32 wrote:
| My heat is controlled and automated with open source
| software for the grand total of about fifty bucks and a
| free surplus server.
| xcambar wrote:
| I don't know how that can be true. Can you tell us more?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I'm considering making an OpenTherm controller for my
| heating boiler, I just researched this topic a few days
| ago - it's absolutely true, there are ready-made Arduino
| libraries for that.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It's incredibly easy to do (caveat - at least if you're
| familiar with software dev already).
|
| Most thermostats are literally just digital thermometers
| that control a relay that turns the furnace/ac on and
| off.
|
| A simple arduino (or much cheaper IC) can easily do the
| same thing if you wire it in.
|
| And then on the software side... there's several large,
| open-source projects that exist in this space and provide
| nice api tooling for interacting with those devices.
| Things like:
|
| OpenHab: https://www.openhab.org/
|
| HomeAssistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/
|
| HomeBridge: https://homebridge.io/
|
| etc...
|
| Even Alexa has basically drop-in self hosted alternatives
| like Mycroft: https://mycroft.ai/ or ADA/Almomd (now
| Genie) https://genie.stanford.edu/
|
| It's not only true - I strongly suspect you can do it for
| much less than 50 bucks if you don't need the physical
| thermostat to have buttons/screens.
| xcambar wrote:
| Makes sense. My setup doesn't allow for that. Hence my
| ignorance. Good for you!
| xcambar wrote:
| controlled heating for my flat with open source and Zigbee
| compatible devices would cost me ~1k. I did not calculate
| the ROI but break even looks like it'd take many years.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Each to their own. Personally the value these cloud/AI
| assistants give me is worth the loss of privacy. There's
| nothing I do that I think anyone would be especially
| interested in spying on, other than to try and sell me
| things.
|
| Note that I don't think anyone should be forced into this
| sort of surveilance. It should always be a choice. I also
| support the open source projects to bring it back to
| individual control - it's just too much hassle for me,
| personally.
| nano9 wrote:
| > There's nothing I do that I think anyone would be
| especially interested in spying on, other than to try and
| sell me things.
|
| Do Uyghurs have something to hide and are worth spying on?
| How many times are we going to hear this argument? It comes
| only from a position of privilege. You're only
| uninteresting to be spied on as long as it's allowed by the
| security apparatus you depend upon. There's a reason we
| have sayings like "power corrupts"; dismissing the
| potential for abuse of a cloud-based unencrypted
| surveillance system is narrow-mindedness at best and
| subversion at worst.
|
| Note: the above hardly represents me politically, it is
| just a counterargument against the perennially repeated "I
| have nothing to hide."
| cwkoss wrote:
| There is no reason this technology needs to rely on
| consumers sacrificing privacy. The big players are trying
| to create that perception in the public so consumers will
| willingly sacrifice their privacy regardless.
|
| The tech is there so someone could make a box with no
| external data transferred that could store and analyze
| video data. I would be a customer for sure for something
| that had this capability without the privacy concerns.
|
| Google and Amazon say they want this data for quality
| control, but I suspect each of them have plans (if not
| active projects) for converting video inside people's homes
| into actionable marketing data.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Just because the data isn't interesting to anyone right now
| doesn't mean that a future oppressive government won't use
| it against you
| gaucheries wrote:
| > the value these cloud/AI assistants give me is worth the
| loss of privacy
|
| they've got you right where they want you.
| csallen wrote:
| He seems to have them right where we he wants them, too.
| Mutual transaction. Everybody's happy.
| xcambar wrote:
| The benefits of the consumer measures in comfort or
| social status, mostly.
|
| The benefits of the producer measures in dollars.
|
| However you balance it, the producer wins. By many orders
| of magnitude.
|
| And since were talking about privacy and personal data,
| the more consumers there are, the more the producers
| improve their margin on each and all consumers.
| [deleted]
| alexmolas wrote:
| (Slightly off topic) If you click in the "RoberDam.com" link that
| appears when you scroll a little bit you get redirected to
| "http://localhost:8080/".
|
| It seems to only happen in the English page. In the Spanish
| version of the post the link works well.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Good catch. There seem to be several "http://localhost:8080/"
| strings in the page source. Leftover code from testing?
| [deleted]
| roberdam wrote:
| Fixed, thanks for the tip Alex!
| ankit70 wrote:
| Still goes to http://localhost:8080/ for me.
| roberdam wrote:
| fixed now?
| AlexErrant wrote:
| Would you mind linking/listing what microphones you're using?
| roberdam wrote:
| I bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on
| the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and
| the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of
| sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same
| software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
| alkonaut wrote:
| People who take notes in life (the org mode people): oh cool.
| Everyone else: why would I want to know what I ate, weighed, or
| thought last week?
| gajus wrote:
| I like this. It vibes with a language learning app concept idea I
| recently shared out loud.
|
| https://twitter.com/kuizinas/status/1591867392220594183
| dotancohen wrote:
| I've been doing this with Anki.
|
| When I have a conversation with someone in a language that I'm
| learning (was Russian and Greek, now Arabic) I record the
| conversation. I then get both native-speaker audio to add to
| Anki for the things they said, plus I get a list of words that
| I either needed to use or that the other person used, to add to
| Anki.
|
| A secondary benefit is that this system encourages me to go out
| and seek interactions with people, a clear benefit for a
| natural introvert.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Very cool idea, the only question I have is how fast does this
| not drain the battery of the mics?
| roberdam wrote:
| the device from the picture has a 5000 mAh battery (around
| 10hrs), and and bought a smaller one (1-2 hrs)
| emilburzo wrote:
| I must be blind, where do you list the microphone(s) you are
| using?
| ojosilva wrote:
| It's pictured in the Spanish version, under "El Equipo":
| https://roberdam.com/wisper.html
| roberdam wrote:
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html
|
| the particular choice was for the battery and the other for
| the size, both are generic and come with the same software
| and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better
| I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
| roberdam wrote:
| I bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one
| on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a
| lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life,
| a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both
| have the same software and bios, only difference is the
| size and battery.
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| It appears to be on the Spanish language version of the
| blog but not the English:
|
| https://roberdam.com/wisper.html
|
| Although in the text it's just described as "a Chinese box"
| with a 5000MaH battery and the ability to record to its
| 32Gb of space in chunks of 30 minutes, as MP3 taking about
| 28mb each.
|
| That section goes on to describe trying different
| microphone positions, as it makes a great difference to
| quality. OP originally tried it in a bag but the results
| were medicore, so moved to a different configuration which,
| although less comfortable, produced superior audio results.
| sorwin wrote:
| How would this work with other voices, like a coffee shop, would
| it hear those simultaneously, and interupt a command?
|
| Also, how do you handle using OpenAi whisper, seems like they do
| 30 second intervals - would that be an issue if your command is
| cut off mid word?
| [deleted]
| roberdam wrote:
| For now I try to give the commands when there is not much
| noise, but you can lower the gain of the microphone so that it
| only record my voice.
|
| The 30 second limit is not a Whisper model limit, but a limit
| some of the free online "try whisper" put.
| rolisz wrote:
| I think he means that even whisper segments the audio into 30
| second bits and does transcribing on them and then stiches
| everything together.
| gruez wrote:
| >RELATIONSHIP THERMOMETER
|
| >According to studies on couple relationships, it is possible to
| predict with an accuracy of up to 90% if the couple is going to
| divorce by studying the interactions, specifically the
| relationship between positive and negative interactions between
| the couple
|
| Apparently the studies that were used to reach that conclusion
| does no such thing and were hilariously flawed.
|
| https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-joh...
|
| >The upshot? What Gottman did wasn't really a prediction of the
| future but a formula built after the couples' outcomes were
| already known. [...] The fundamental problem is that no matter
| how many equations, even quite similar ones, Gottman generates,
| we have no real idea of his forecasting power because of the way
| he reports his data
| Barrin92 wrote:
| literally horoscopes for tech bros. I am starting to be
| slightly concerned that there's actually people out there who
| think some sentiment analysis python package is going to tell
| them what their individual relationships are like.
| recuter wrote:
| brb, need to edit my pitch deck..
| fl0id wrote:
| Oh there definitely are.
| [deleted]
| warrenm wrote:
| Sounds very similar to the guy talked about in Albert-Laszlo
| Barabasi's book (either Bursts, or Linked ... don't recall which
| atm) - he was photoing/videoing his whole life, but never of
| _himself_ - ie, the camera was always facing outward (like a
| policeman 's bodycam)
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| The entire topic and many posts in this comment page also sound
| like things straight out of The Circle and The Every by Dave
| Eggers.
| ISL wrote:
| What a bonanza for opposing counsel of any kind.
|
| (which is a bummer, as there are lots of interesting uses for
| digitizing our lives if the data could be guaranteed to remain
| private)
| iwillbenice wrote:
| varispeed wrote:
| I have recording turned on on my phone. Usually it records 6
| hours at a time, so it is annoying that I have to manually
| restart recording. Another annoying thing is that it will pause
| the recording when I pick up a call.
|
| Why Google decided to block call recording is beyond me. In the
| past when I was able to record calls it saved me a lot of trouble
| - for instance when insurance company lied to me over the phone
| about the product I could confront them about it and get my money
| back. I wish I could be able to record calls with my relatives as
| well. Call recording is legal in my country.
| otikik wrote:
| I liked this article and find it intriguing. That said, I would
| set the original sound data to expire relatively quickly, perhaps
| erasing everything week or so. I like letting the past be the
| past.
| j_mo wrote:
| Doesn't this break wiretapping laws (depending on the user's
| geographic location) and possibly GDPR/NDAs(if left on while at
| work)?
|
| Ethically most people probably wouldn't be happy to find out that
| you recorded a conversation with them.
| roberdam wrote:
| I am using it with friends and family, and tell them beforehand
| about the experiment
| yuvalkarmi wrote:
| I think your last sentence summarizes the sentiment really well:
| "The difference between utopia or dystopia is who has access to
| that information"
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| The passive information would be useful if that would work with
| your inner voice.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I read a research paper quite some time ago that most inner
| monologue is articulated at least partially by the mouth,
| throat, & tongue, and can be detected. Might be a better
| approach than having a chip in my brain.
|
| If I find the article I will update.
| piperswe wrote:
| Anecdotally, my inner monologue certainly is physically
| articulated. It would be really interesting to build tech
| that can understand it.
| fragmede wrote:
| what's fascinating is apparently there's a connection with
| schizophrenia, where the "voices" are actually the person
| saying things to themselves at a level too low for other
| people to hear
|
| also suggests a throat mic would do wonders
| luuuzeta wrote:
| That would be creepy and next level.
|
| Isn't that what Musk's Neurolink is trying to achieve?
| wildermuthn wrote:
| Love this idea. Most people subvocalize when they read, and my
| guess is the same for when they write. As for subvocalizing
| when we think, I have no idea, but I suppose if one were
| engaged in "talking to oneself" type thinking, that it could be
| possible that many subvocalize their internal monologues.
|
| Is there some kind of sensor that one could wear that would be
| unobtrusive enough to measure subvocalization? If so, building
| a training dataset for an ML model would be as simple as having
| many people read and write a significant amount of text while
| using the sensor.
|
| Even better if that text corpus overlaps with text that has
| been used to train text-to-speech models like Whisper, as you
| might get away with knowledge transfer with such a model.
|
| It's definitely worth looking into!
| twobitshifter wrote:
| With feedback, it is likely possible for you to train
| yourself to subvocalize your thoughts as an act of recording.
| I thought this sentence before writing it, but I
| subvvocalized while typing.
| driverdan wrote:
| That technology doesn't exist yet.
| tegiddrone wrote:
| I did an experiment where I lived for awhile with a sony
| recorder/mic on me 24/7. It was nice to be able to refer back to
| conversations and events when I wanted them. Biggest issue was
| sorting through the data-- timestamps and recorder bookmarks were
| OK but I really needed full text search on the audio. It would
| have been great to tag via `Robert, mark timestamp, end Robert`.
| AI seems to be required, especially when dealing with wind noise
| and other issues (like the mic twisting around and all of a
| sudden one channel is my heartbeat.)
|
| The sony voice recorder out there easily last 24 hrs on 1 AAA
| battery.. dumping to mp3 on a large sd card.
| troydavis wrote:
| I did a similar experiment in about 2005 using a small iRiver
| iFP [1] and reached the same conclusion.
|
| It needed a physical "Something interesting just happened"
| button that could be annotated later. At the time, creating
| custom hardware as well as the entire software/service stack
| was more than I was willing to bite off.
|
| The iFP is tiny, roughly a 4" long by 1.5-2" cylinder. It
| easily covered a full day, the silence detection worked great,
| and quality was fine when used in a pocket or on a belt.
| Basically, the stuff that I expected to be difficult was
| already solved.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_iFP_series,
| https://www.cnet.com/reviews/iriver-ifp-790-digital-player-r...
| jconley wrote:
| This is a cool project. One of my pet ideas that I haven't done
| is to build a home assistant where all data is stored and
| processed by a home "server". The biggest benefit I see is that
| it could truly be omnipresent. There in the background, answering
| questions, jumping into your conversations without prompt. And
| it's much less creepy if all that data isn't going to someone
| else's computer.
|
| Also piping in and processing the data from my mobile would be
| cool, but I wouldn't want to invade other people's privacy if I'm
| in public.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason
| this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel
| on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those
| kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.
| tsejerome97 wrote:
| this is also one of my pet ideas, but I keep procrastinating.
| Have your idea transformed into any kind of repos that we can
| contribute to?
| karol wrote:
| What are the limitations of numbers as descriptors of Being?
| specialist wrote:
| Excellent. Just terrific.
|
| My future perfect system also logs my location and what I'm
| doing. And probably health metrics too, like heart and breathing
| rate.
|
| Instead of initiating my exercises, I just want to say "Robert,
| start jog". The "modal" nature of my Apple Watch's Activities
| really frustrates me.
|
| I don't want to take notes while I'm listening to a podcast. I'm
| generally doing something else at the time. I just want to say
| "Robert, bookmark". And magically a link will be made to whatever
| I'm listening to at the time. (Audio book, radio, stream,
| podcast, whatever.)
|
| Ditto identifying songs (Shazam!).
|
| I don't want to fart around with exchanging contact information.
| My hands are usually full or whatever. Just say "Robert, contact
| info" and then repeat out loud whatever I hear.
|
| I also want to rewind after the fact. When trying to recall a
| tidbit, I'll remember the song, where I was (eg while walking the
| dog), who I was with, what I was eating. So if I want to remember
| which podcast I was listening to while at the park, I'd just
| start with my location log and jump over to my podcast listening
| log.
|
| What could be more simple?
|
| FWIW, I'm still waiting for my "bicycle for the mind".
|
| PS- I've tried, half-heartedly, to use the voice recorder app,
| and notes with voice transcription. But then it quickly becomes a
| treasure hunt. And my attempts to do this stuff with Siri just
| leaves me more frustrated.
|
| Thanks for listening.
|
| Great project. Please keep us posted on updates.
| roberdam wrote:
| thanks!, you should try to transcribe your recordings now for
| free with whisper and see what you can make of them:
| https://replicate.com/openai/whisper
| Ninjinka wrote:
| The advent of Whisper gave me a similar idea, except instead of
| uploading the recording once a day, it worked by calling my
| computer from my phone and recording and processing in batches.
| Realized pretty quickly that most of my day is silent though, and
| would rather be able to trigger it on demand, which I haven't
| gotten around to.
| artursapek wrote:
| _insert men with autism meme_
| effnorwood wrote:
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I'm a bit concerned about the calorie level I see here, 832/day.
| That is about 1/3 of the NHS recommendation [1] for males.
|
| 1. https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-
| diet/wha...
| mikedelago wrote:
| I agree, but looking at the actual food eaten, it doesn't seem
| to line up.
| [deleted]
| lars512 wrote:
| It's typical in calorie tracking that people start the day
| strong, but then forget or lose will to track later in the day.
| Ideally days without a full record should be excluded; I'm
| assuming that's just not happening here.
| pelorat wrote:
| Those recommendations are for people that are on their feet all
| day, not for office workers and home dwellers that never go to
| the gym.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, you add more calories if you're active. The USDA has a
| breakdown by age, gender, and activity level [0]. 2400
| calories is recommended for an adult sedentary male between
| 21 and 40.
|
| Sedentary is now the norm in the developed world, so it would
| be weird to use active as the baseline for health
| recommendations.
|
| [0] https://www.fns.usda.gov/estimated-calorie-needs-day-age-
| gen...
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Estimations for roman soldier on the march come closer to
| 3000 calories.
| rjh29 wrote:
| The lamb sandwich, orange juice and almonds alone could
| approach 800 calories, even excluding the other three meals.
| People are quite bad at estimating calories though, it takes
| practice.
| dsalzman wrote:
| I've been experimenting with this recently as well, but with an
| app on my apple watch. Looking for a method/model to split
| different speakers into different tracks to only look at audio
| from myself and certain people.
| dsalzman wrote:
| Someone is experimenting with diarization (speaker
| identification) + Whisper here
| https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/264
| fragmede wrote:
| If you know how many speakers there are,
| https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp has it working here:
|
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1V-Bt5Hm2kjaDb4P1RyM.
| ..
| TOMDM wrote:
| Check out this model, I've had limited success with it. Best
| I've done so far is to just add the labels it gives to the
| overlapping segments whisper spits out, which means some
| sentences have multiple speakers, but that's mostly the case
| because of cross-talk. I'd say it gets it right ~80% of the
| time with the 5 speakers I've done it on across ~16 hours of
| audio.
|
| https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization
| dsalzman wrote:
| I will!
| roberdam wrote:
| Speaker identification is the next step, you might want to read
| about Pyannote's Diarization:
|
| https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-speaker-identi...
| waprin wrote:
| Ahh I'm working on exact same project. I applied to YC with the
| idea and was told that "nobody wants this" during the
| interview.
|
| There's a ton of problems in the space around privacy and UX.
| But I'm incredibly excited about projects in this space because
| in modern society we're basically surrounded by a million
| unhealthy things designed to tempt us. Logging forces you to
| "stay honest". I've been shocked already by how many unhealthy
| habits I underestimated and how many healthy habits I
| overestimated.
|
| My #1 priority is just to improve my own physical and mental
| health. Whether there's a market for this stuff, who knows.
|
| Good luck!
| dsalzman wrote:
| My original inspiration is to better understand how I talk to
| others and study my own behavior
| waprin wrote:
| A noble goal. One of my bad habits I've been tracking and
| trying to reduce is rude behavior to people, online or in-
| person.
| jordanlwalker wrote:
| we're experimenting building out a version of this too, but on
| desktop with www.usebacktrack.com - should have splitting
| speakers/inputs early next year and seeing what that's like
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Expanding on the structure the OP created, this is how I see us
| getting to human level AI:
|
| 1. Record video sound etc... (trajectories) egocentrically
|
| 2. Analyze the data and assign reward labels (more/good,
| less/bad) to state and transitions actions
|
| 3. Use the reward feedback and trajectories to build the policy
| for some set of actions in certain environments
|
| This is why I'm bullish on anything sousveillance - so AR cameras
| on your head, always on mics etc...
|
| The challenge is doing this democratically, without it being
| intermediated by a giant for-profit mega corp that doesn't care
| about you and wants to mess with your head
| pa7ch wrote:
| Honest question,how does this make the lives of humans better?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Well, for example. Lets say that I have a goal BMI I want to
| maintain
|
| If I reach for the Oreos, I can choose to have a flag set
| with a heuritic I created myself that will tell me:
|
| "Having 5 oreos means you need to reduce other calorie intake
| by n calories to maintain your BMI"
|
| That data can also be aggregated to give me my macro/micros
| for everything I've eaten etc... without me having to log it
| like I do now
|
| Think about it as the ultimate personal assistant and all you
| need to do to instrument it is attaching a camera and mic to
| your face. You can decide what your goals are, and this kind
| of instrumentation will capture the data that you need
| without you having to actually annotate everything.
|
| Your personal life API
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > all you need to do to instrument it is attaching a camera
| and mic to your face
|
| It's funny that this is a reasonable thing to say.
| crtified wrote:
| Likewise, if we go back to 1995, and tell a tech-fearing
| farmer that within 20 years he and all his salt-of-the-
| earth colleagues would soon be voluntarily (and gladly!)
| carrying in their back pocket (in the form of a cell
| phone) a small cheap generic device connected 24/7 to
| global corporate networks, with built-in high def
| cameras, microphones, location detectors, and data
| gatherers, and would casually store much of their
| personal and financial information within them.
|
| They would find that notion preposterous. But now, some
| short years later, they would give it barely a thought.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It really is.
|
| I've been in CV since 2009 and it's face melting how many
| things we thought were impossible are effectively
| "solved."
| mahathu wrote:
| Sounds like a nightmare!
| azeirah wrote:
| I'd just get really annoyed at that AI
|
| ...being annoyed increases stress, which increases appetite
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I've been thinking about doing this for a while now,
| cameras all over the house hooked up to ML algorithms that
| help you audit and tweak your behavior towards some
| specified goal.
|
| When I used to play video games ultra competitively, I
| would analyze recordings of my gameplay to try and get
| better, and it worked wonders.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I've honestly thought about recording my work sessions to
| do the same thing. RescueTime works _somewhat_ to track
| when I get distracted on something, but moreso I'm
| interested in identifying when I do something
| suboptimally and playing it back to identify why I went
| with that path and try to course-correct the next time
| around.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Recording the desktop 24/7 and making those videos
| searchable could be an incredible tool as well. Text on
| screen as well as audio from meetings. If you didn't
| document how you initially configured something, you
| could just go back and watch what you did.
|
| Edit: Another comment has informed me of rewind.ai, which
| does this on Mac, interesting!
| thingification wrote:
| Another challenge is industry-wide bad security fundamentals.
|
| Godspeed to work/people like agoric.com and seL4.
| apienx wrote:
| Well done!
|
| Got a similar PoC that uses Tasker to record sound on my phone,
| Whisper to convert it to text, and neatly organizes everything
| into Obsidian.md. The continuous recording kills the battery life
| on my phone so it's only usable if you don't mind going around
| with a powerbank. Would be great if a manufacturer would put in a
| separate low-energy chip with a good ADC.
|
| P.S. "Active functions" with custom home automation is easy as
| pie with joaoapps's suite. I use BusyBox to SSH into a Pi with a
| Tellstick Duo. And some RFID tags for the system to know where I
| am (e.g. bedtime routine gets triggered when I place my phone on
| the bedside table). But yeah...traffic goes thru Google.
| roberdam wrote:
| you should write about it!
| moritonal wrote:
| Handling the privacy of other people might be oddly easy. If you
| can detect the voice accurately enough the AI might be able to
| _drop_ the other participants.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Dropping after the fact still means it was recorded, this
| violating two party notice statutes.
| TOMDM wrote:
| What if it was never written to disk? The identification and
| trimming happening before any audio is actually saved.
|
| Is picking someone else up on microphone at all a violation
| of two party consent? For example walking past someone in
| public with a loudspeaker call active.
| riiri778 wrote:
| I think there is even legal precedent for that. Dragnet
| surveillance recording of all phone calls. It was argued
| that recordings are only "stored". Judge order is needed
| for "retrieval", that may be several weeks later.
| morsch wrote:
| Does that mean that every phone recording audio to detect its
| assistant trigger phrase villages two party notice statutes?
| humanistbot wrote:
| Yes.
| morsch wrote:
| These assistants have been around for a while, seems like
| that would have been established in court if it was the
| case.
| Void_ wrote:
| Not as hardcore as OP, but after Whisper came out, I quickly
| built an app that allows me to record from lock screen:
| https://whispermemos.com/
| runjake wrote:
| This app apparently sends data to their servers. If you don't
| want to share this information, you can use an app like
| Lockflow (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lockflow-lock-screen-
| shortcuts...) to put an Apple Shortcut on your home screen.
|
| That Apple Shortcut could be the Dictate Text action hooked to
| create/append to an Apple Note (thereby not leaving your
| device) or fire off an email or send a message via your
| favorite bot service (Discord/Telegram/Slack/etc).
|
| Bonus: That Shortcut will also work on your Mac.
|
| There's also the minimal friction app Just Press Record
| (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-press-record/id1033342465),
| which will transcribe and has a decent Shortcut library.
| Void_ wrote:
| Yeah I tried JPR before but missed the workflow of sending it
| to my email. (Maybe they have it and I didn't notice)
|
| Also Whisper is better for my Slovakian accent.
| toss1 wrote:
| That looks like it's iOS only; I've been using a similar app on
| Android, Voiceliner, but it doesn't yet also record from the
| lock screen. That would definitely make it more useful!
| kettleballroll wrote:
| As you'd be recording all of your conversations, this is illegal
| under some legislations, unless all your conversation partners
| agree with being recorded/their convos being stored.
| roberdam wrote:
| I am using it with friends and family, and tell them beforehand
| about the experiment
| humanistbot wrote:
| What about going out to a restaurant, a party, a date, or
| even somebody you bump into on the street? You're recording a
| lot of people, which to me is a huge invasion of privacy.
| What do you do if someone is uncomfortable with being
| recorded?
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Same question applies for any photograph you take in
| public. Isn't the fact that the people are in public
| material to whether or not they can be recorded? That's
| different than calling them on their phone and recording
| that conversation.
|
| I mentioned it in another reply but this is discussed in
| The Every by Dave Eggers, there is essentially an entire
| area of San Francisco that is deliberately kept free of any
| and all devices that can record A/V and in order to enter
| you have to deposit your phone and be wanded to detect
| surreptitious recording devices.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I mean, at a practical level, you don't tell them and
| ignore it. The fact that it is illegal to record people
| doesn't mean it's against your personal ethics.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| In some countries it's enough for one party to consent, which
| can be you, so it's legal.
| m-watson wrote:
| In the US it even varies by state, which has gotten people in
| trouble with recorded phone calls.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| Is it illegal to record it, or is it simply inadmissible in
| court?
| [deleted]
| chatterhead wrote:
| This is awesome! I've been recording myself (video/audio) for the
| last couple years on and off (thousands of hours) and have no
| efficient way of processing the info. Was not aware of Whisper
| and what he's done is exactly what I'm looking to pull off.
|
| The GPT-3 idea is scary and most certainly the future. I can't
| stand the world of never ending 'Moviefone' menus and chatbots,
| but when it's me that gets to be the machine response the future
| doesn't seem so annoying. Would be nice to have my own GPT-3
| model that I can use to "get to a real person" when calling
| places.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| vachina wrote:
| Awesome idea. However people would find it weird that I talk to
| myself all day long.
| nashashmi wrote:
| A case for neuralink.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| Yeah, I can see how this would be easier if you work from home,
| but you could explain that you are running a long lived
| experiment on yourself. Then again, that doesn't exactly scream
| "I am fully sane" :)
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| Well, genius borders madness, and it's been said that talking
| to oneself is a sign of intelligence, so you may be right.
| riiri778 wrote:
| I do that as well. I had a few arguments with police patrol over
| driving tickets. Once dog attack and very aggressive dog owner.
| Player6225 wrote:
| I'm curious if there was other work you were inspired by. I have
| also been a bit interested in using this style of "personal
| database/logger/journaling";
|
| task-agnostic input -> processing -> visualization/recall
|
| My assumption is you are just storing post-processed conclusions
| in a local db on your computer + raw audio for possible future
| re-processing, and not currently storing other media input (ala
| food pics)?
| roberdam wrote:
| I'm trying to catch up with all the opensource AI stuff out
| there and explore the posibilities, on the spanish part of the
| website is a test with stable diffusion and twitter, and now
| I'm trying to finetune Donut document transformer.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| An off the shelf solution for recording your whole life:
|
| I have a Sony recorder, ICD-UX570, and it has a setting where it
| turns on or off based on sound, and also adjusts the gain to best
| record. It takes a micro-SD card and has pretty solid battery.
|
| I think you could put it in a breast pocket and run it for
| several days on a single charge. Because it would just record
| when you are talking or making noises you could likely run it for
| a year on a big SD card recording in mp3.
|
| Change to a wifi SD card and suck the files off and process them
| and you might have something kind of cool.
| [deleted]
| ycombinete wrote:
| Would the sound of jostling in your pocket/bag not set off the
| recording?
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I'm not sure about jostling, but lots of noises would set it
| off. It's erring on the side of recording when there is
| sound, and it can't tell speak from not speach, though you
| can set a sensitivity level.
| sdze wrote:
| That calorie tracking will be WAY off and useless if not
| dangerous. Nothing beats a kitchen scale.
| hawski wrote:
| Great idea. However always recording is a disadvantage for me.
|
| I thought about a device that could look a bit like Star Trek
| badge. It should react to pushing it slightly and it would have a
| microphone. It would connect to a phone with Bluetooth.
|
| Main use for me would be push-to-talk as I use Zello with my wife
| quite a lot. But all those reliable assistant/voice-notes uses
| would be also sweet.
| edw519 wrote:
| Too bad Abbot and Costello aren't around to attend a standup with
| a bunch of people using your app. - Robert Robert
| what did you do yesterday End Robert - Robert I met with
| Robert in accounting to finish Jira 12392 story on the Robertson
| patches End Robert - Robert Then I took a break to have
| coffee and watch a Julia Roberts short with Robert in System
| Admin End Robert - Robert Robert what are you going to do
| today End Robert - Robert It depends if Robert Roberts has
| internet access End Robert - Robert If he doesn't, that'll
| be the end of Robert Roberts End Robert - Robert No
| impediments for either Robert in the Robert epic End Robert
| - Robert Robert's on Help Desk, Jean Robert's in Code Review, and
| Sam Robertson's running the Roberton's retrospective End Robert
| - Robert But then who is Robert Robertson? End Robert -
| Robert Oh Robert Robertson's our scrum master! End Robert
| [deleted]
| roberdam wrote:
| MORE INFO ON THE DEVICES:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html
|
| both recorders are using the same generic bios, you have a .txt
| file called FACTORY.TXT, by changing the values of the file you
| configure the device, this is the content of the file.
|
| ---------------
|
| TYP:1 (0:WAV 1:MP3)
|
| VOR:0 (0:voice-activated off 1-7:voice-activated
| sensitivity,higher means record less)
|
| BIT RATE:2 (0:32Kbit 1:64Kbit 2:128Kbit 3:192Kbit 4:Translate ON
| 5:512Kbit 6:768Kbit 7:1024Kbit 8:1536Kbit 9:3072Kbit)
|
| GAIN:5 (0-7 record sensitivity 8 grades)
|
| SECTION:(30) (1-999 record time exceed this,file will auto
| save,uint minutes)
|
| DATE:2022-10-15 (year-month-day)
|
| TIME:08:36:24 (hour:minute:second)
|
| TIMER:1 (timer record 1:on 0:off)
|
| START:08:39:32 (timer record start time)
|
| TIMELONG:(120) (1-720,timer record length,uint is minute)
|
| CYCLE:(030) (1-999,how many dyas,0:everyday)
|
| --------------------------
|
| I got the 32gb version of the bigger one and the 16gb version of
| the smaller one.
|
| I configure the device to save a file each 30m, each 30m mp3 file
| takes 28.125kb, so around 56mb per hour at 128kbps
| tezza wrote:
| So where _was_ the remote control ?
| luuuzeta wrote:
| I'd be so self-conscious with my speech being recorded roughly
| 24/7 by myself. I'd probably get used to it but it'd take some
| time.
| ogicar wrote:
| Very interesting idea.
|
| Would you be willing to share more info on the tech used in the
| process?
|
| >I bought a couple of Chinese microphones
|
| Which exact microphones? How long does their battery last?
|
| As well as other parts of the process.
| roberdam wrote:
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html
|
| the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the
| size, both are generic and come with the same software and
| bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would
| look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
| rmac wrote:
| Not the OP but I've been tinkering with the same concept (24/7
| processing).
|
| 'm using vosk browser: https://github.com/ccoreilly/vosk-
| browser
|
| To do speech to text locally and it works very well for
| English.
| baldr333 wrote:
| You're mentally ill
| hit8run wrote:
| Interesting article. Thanks for posting this. I think when
| wearing something like google glass and recording everything the
| potential is even bigger. The AI can extract so much more
| context. Analyse faces, gestures, locations and more. Dystopian
| and yet so interesting.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| This sounds horrible. Nobody should freely record and analyze
| others without consent. This is not only dystopian but also
| very rude and possibly illegal.
|
| As far as recording oneself to capture thoughts, processes,
| this is a fine idea that I'd like to give it a try.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Why are you so self-obsessed?
| gradascent wrote:
| Why are you so mean-spirited?
| thro_213r692s wrote:
| Why is this being upvoted ? There is no code
| ajkjk wrote:
| Did you think there was a requirement to have code?
| mtlynch wrote:
| For normal blog posts, no, but OP is submitting as "Show HN"
| which requires it to be something readers can try on their
| own:
|
| > _Show HN is for something you 've made that other people
| can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback,
| and ask questions in the thread._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
|
| This is an on-topic blog post, but it doesn't seem to fit the
| criteria of a Show HN.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Hm, how can you tell it was a Show HN? Doesn't seem to be
| in the title. Maybe it was before?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > My biggest problem with "OK Google" is that I don't know by
| heart what it can do interactively
|
| Maybe it's just me but this feels unaddressed and that seems
| ridiculous.
|
| Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my
| phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can
| work with?
| jononor wrote:
| I would not count on Google to make public any such thing. But
| a third party could test it out to build such a list. And that
| could include caveats like "works if you ask in this form, no
| if you ask in this other form".
| throw7 wrote:
| Other OK Google problems:
|
| o it changes. who cares if you know even some "commands"...
| it'll break. I used to ask google maps when driving "Ok Google,
| ETA". It's been many many years since that stopped working.
|
| o can't change name/ATTN keyword. how dumb is your AI that you
| can't even rename _your_ assistant. /s
| krono wrote:
| Oh yeah the constant syntax changes got me to stop using it
| entirely.
|
| Commands would suddenly lead to web searches, I'd then have
| to _Google_ the new set of magic words to make it set a
| reminder or whatever, only for it to break again two weeks
| later.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location
| on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or
| Google can work with?
|
| The likely answer here is that the engineers who work on such
| products would scoff at the idea that their work amounts to a
| simple list of commands. In their minds, they're working on a
| natural language virtual assistant, whose understanding of user
| input is "intelligent", and it should know what you want
| regardless of how you phrase it. Want to do something? Just
| ask! Treat it as if it's a person! The possibilities are
| endless!
|
| Never mind that its _actual functionality_ (y'know... the
| things it can do when it understands you) is embarrassingly
| finite and boils down to a "list of commands" anyway.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Yes, is there a list of every command a human can execute or
| can work with?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There isn't, but a partial list could be assembled.
|
| Most human interactions are context-triggered and heavily
| scripted.
|
| This is easy to see on social media where responses to a
| popular trigger post fall into groups. A lot of people make
| one of a small number of generic expected responses, and
| there's an even smaller number of funny/off-beat posts -
| which all make the same joke.
|
| Occasionally you get a truly original inventive reply. But
| only very rarely.
|
| I have a vague memory of a fringe AI startup which has been
| trying to formalise that contextual database since the 90s.
| recuter wrote:
| Yes, actually, here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
| If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English
| Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich
| language and eliminate the words that can be made by
| putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the
| concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words.
| The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn
| spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of
| usage are identical to full English so that the
| practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple,
| English. We call this simplified language Basic
| English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was
| released in 1930 with the book: Basic English: A General
| Introduction with Rules and Grammar.
|
| Even Includes 200 picturables: http://ogden.basic-
| english.org/wordpic0.html
|
| _" A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction
| work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of
| Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English
| is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which
| after long struggles a global authoritarian government
| manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as
| a second language."_
|
| - Sounds pretty close to Siri and the other digital
| assistants to me. Ever watch people from none English
| countries use their smartphones? Not all of it is
| implemented yet but this is almost all you need to run an
| empire.
|
| Here it is deployed in favor of much needed disciplinary
| action for two Scottish people:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOUTfUmI8vs
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| Anyone reminded of XKCD's "Up goer five" strip
| (https://xkcd.com/1133/), or is it just me?
| 314 wrote:
| He expanded the idea into a book:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
| QuantumSeed wrote:
| I would love to see something similar to Basic English: A
| General Introduction with Rules and Grammer for other
| languages. It seems like it would be a great tool for
| learning a new language.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > Here it is deployed in favor of much needed
| disciplinary action for two Scottish people
|
| There was a moment when call centers started deploying
| "just say it" en masse - and I was literally in panic.
| Luckily, they brought back "or enter" pretty soon and
| also en masse.
|
| To be fair to robots you protein constructs are not much
| better. In a two mile radius of our company's office
| humans trained themselves to understand Russian accent
| pretty well. But beyond that...
| ninkendo wrote:
| Not sure what side of the debate you're taking here, but I
| think you've outlined the issue perfectly.
|
| Engineers: "We couldn't have a list of commands, that's not
| how humans work, you're supposed to treat Alexa like a
| human, and the possibilities are endless"
|
| Users: "Ok, then. Alexa, take out the trash."
|
| Alexa: "Sorry, I can't do that."
|
| (Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless, right?)
|
| I can somewhat understand general knowledge queries. For
| those, you can totally make the case that there's just too
| many things you can ask about to enumerate them all.
|
| But imperative commands, like sending text messages,
| setting timers, or home automation? There's a finite list
| of those, since at the end of the day they actually have to
| be authored by some human who's writing a (say) Alexa
| skill. The number of utterances that may map to those
| skills are unbounded, but _the number of skills aren 't._
| So yes, at the end of the day, for "command" like things,
| they really should be able to give a list of them.
| sofetch wrote:
| > (Ok, so obviously the possibilities aren't endless,
| right?)
|
| This does not follow from the above. The set of positive
| integers is countably infinite. So is the set of positive
| even integers. Even if "half of the positive integers are
| missing!" there are still "endless" even postive
| integers.
| serverholic wrote:
| You should do some self reflection on why you felt the
| need to make a comment just to make yourself look smart.
| sofetch wrote:
| > why you felt the need to make a comment just to make
| yourself look smart.
|
| I hardly think it made me look smart. It's borderline
| trivial. The parent comment was insanely reductive in the
| stadnard HN style. I was hoping to help reduce the
| appearance of future such comments.
|
| Sibling comments indicate that it had no positive effect.
| Such is life.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > This does not follow from the above
|
| Well, I elaborated after. There's an actual finite set of
| skills that are coded up by actual engineers. A natural
| language system isn't hallucinating the ABI for the
| function calls that send text messages. There's code
| there which takes the utterance and sends the texts. What
| I'm saying is that you can take an inventory of what
| skills have been written (and/or are installed), and
| y'know... _document them_ somewhere.
| sofetch wrote:
| > you can take an inventory of what skills have been
| written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document
| them somewhere.
|
| Sure. I didn't take exception with anything except the
| standard HN middlebrow dismissal.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I'm not giving a middlebrow dismissal. There exists a
| real discoverability problem with virtual assistants, and
| asking users to "just try things" leads them to try
| things that _don 't work_, and then conclude that the
| assistant must not be as useful as they thought.
|
| Moreover, when an assistant doesn't do a thing, you're
| unlikely to try it again later; instead most people will
| conclude "I guess it can't do that" and move on. If they
| add the feature later, it's too late.
|
| With every failed request, your confidence that an
| assistant really is intelligent and can understand you,
| diminishes more and more. Every time a user hits a dead
| end with a virtual assistant, it doesn't encourage them
| to try more things that _do_ work, it instead gives the
| user less confident that _anything_ will.
|
| I can't count the number of times my wife has been
| surprised I can get Siri to do things. Her typical
| response is "I can never get her to understand me so I
| just stick with timers." It's a real problem, and I'm not
| being dismissive of anything.
|
| In contrast, reread your comment in this context. You're
| taking my comment, reading in the _least charitable way_
| , condescending to me about the meaning of finite when
| the rest of my comment clarifies what I mean, and being
| completely dismissive of the point I'm trying to make.
| How can you say _I 'm_ the one issuing middlebrow
| dismissals?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| By that logic the calculator app has an (effectively)
| infinite amount of functionality since there is an
| infinite number of integers which you can add together.
|
| Somehow though they still list all the features.
| sofetch wrote:
| > By that logic
|
| This doesn't follow at all. It's not what I said and I
| find it difficult to believe that you even think it's
| what I said.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Not having lists means they can collect more training data.
|
| Build a database of all the attempted interactions. Cluster
| them by task. Sort by most used (or most monetizable) that
| the system can't support today. Bam! You've got a rough
| futures capabilities roadmap.
|
| It's more complicated of course but here you literally have a
| large customer base telling you what it wants, but your
| product can't yet do, regularly.
| technofiend wrote:
| Unfortunately there's also drift in behavior that comes
| from retraining. "OK Google, play NPR news headlines" get
| different results some days than others. Sometimes I get
| the latest hourly news, sometimes I get a robot voice
| reading headlines to me. Sometimes asking to dial someone
| calls them, sometimes it returns search results. Yadda.
| counttheforks wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's what Google is doing. More than half
| of my queries result in a "Let me google that for you"
| response where it pulls up a search page.
| capableweb wrote:
| Apple's "assistant" is similarly useless. The best use case
| I have for it is when I'm driving and pondering about
| something silly so I ask it: "How does X do Y?" or similar,
| and the response in 99% of the cases is "I can't show this
| to you right now".
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Alexa takes "the customer is always right" a little too
| far: Me: Alexa, when do babies double
| their birth weight? Alexa: According to an Amazon
| customer, some time within the first month. Does that
| answer your question? Me: No!
|
| (The true answer is more like 5 months:
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-
| todd....)
| cool-RR wrote:
| There isn't even an enumerated list of all the features of the
| Google search engine (i.e. quotes for full expression, minus to
| rule out words etc.) And this might be the most popular web
| service in the world!
| kevincox wrote:
| There is actually a fairly good list here:
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
|
| I know for a fact that it isn't complete. But most of the
| "secret" ones that I am aware of were very obscure and
| usually buggy, so maybe this is all of the officially
| supported ones.
| actualwitch wrote:
| I've been thinking about wiring up whisper[0], mozilla's tts[1]
| and gpt-3 together to make a voice assistant of sorts. Wouldn't
| have the access to device hardware and no guarantees of correct
| answers, but should blow siri etc out of the water in terms of
| understanding the context.
|
| [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper [1]
| https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
| MikePlacid wrote:
| It should also talk to spammers and provide them fake credit
| card numbers.
| hatware wrote:
| > Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location
| on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or
| Google can work with?
|
| Because engineers (and managers) contrive problems like this to
| the point they are useless solutions.
| electroly wrote:
| The original Siri had such a list. I found it demonstrated
| here: https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=716
|
| Did that ever make it to release? I can't remember seeing it on
| my actual phone.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Forge36 wrote:
| Third party integrations?
|
| It's both a static list (available to everyone) and a dynamic
| list (available only to you).
|
| Having seen all the dead products at Google. Who would get
| rewarded for this/compensated? Would the complexity in building
| the list increase ongoing costs with an unclear return on
| investment?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Presumably, there is a list somewhere in Google's internal
| documentation. All we're asking for, is for them to copy and
| paste it from that documentation, clean it up a bit, and post
| it online.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There probably isn't. There'll be some hard coded "if this,
| say that", but there are a lot of _trained_ responses in
| the models that won't be as simple as that.
| davidy123 wrote:
| It would change constantly over time, and would eventually
| become very large. It's an interesting idea, though, a school
| subject on how to interact with your AI. Lots of grammer,
| machine learning theory, culture, a bit of security, etc, to
| second guess it.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Students in most public schools don't even learn English
| grammar now in most states. That went away at some point in
| the Bush or Obama administrations, probably due to the NCLB
| and Common Core initiatives. It is not uncommon now to
| encounter college students who simply have never heard of a
| "direct object." They need classes on the grammar of their
| own language more than they need a school subject on
| interacting with an overhyped and underperforming Siri.
| zrail wrote:
| Common Core has English grammar as a foundational skill.
| Your specific example is taught in grade 5.
|
| That said, English is a difficult language and I'm not at
| all surprised that people get through school without fully
| grasping the names for grammar concepts, even if they use
| them every day.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I learned this when I was about 20, met a foreign friend
| online who was formally learning English, and I couldn't
| answer most of her questions.
|
| It was a bizarre but very educational moment: I use
| English like I write code: I have no formal education on
| it but I seem to do fine.
| nshm wrote:
| You can use open source assistant instead like Dicio
| https://github.com/Stypox/dicio-android and configure it the
| way you like.
| thom wrote:
| It also annoys me that there's no (obvious) meta-interactions
| with most smart assistants to explore what's possible. I can't
| easily ask "can you do X?" or "what can you do with Y?"
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| This, plus the already-discussed lack of a list of working
| commands, further cements my belief that "voice assistants"
| are not there for the benefit of those who keep them in their
| homes.
| wincy wrote:
| I stopped using Alexa after it almost burned my house down on
| thanksgiving. Apparently "bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for
| thirty minutes" somehow became "microwave for thirty minutes"
| even though it got all the words except bake! Who sets a
| temperature with their microwave?
|
| Anyway we meant to bake something but instead absolutely
| roasted a metal pan and wire rack that merged into the glass
| somehow.
|
| My wife thinks it's kind of funny because the Disneyworld
| "Carousel of Progress" shows a very similar event happening due
| to voice controls, which they predicted in the 1960s!
| habibur wrote:
| Excellent idea. You can later search through your logs in the
| future for reference. As it's all in text.
|
| Prior solutions posted on the net, had this take photo / record
| audio 24/7 features, but then those were stuck there. What next?
| What would anyone do with these data?
|
| But this Hi Jarvis styled recording of text on the go is a very
| useful feature.
|
| Another step ahead.
| roberdam wrote:
| I think the "total recall" search can be a killer feature
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I've wanted to do the same thing with my online activity as
| well. Chat logs especially. They tend to go into a void and
| finding an older log is weirdly difficult. I've wanted to log
| everything and then be able to apply better search algos
| (semantic search perhaps) to try and make my chat logs useful.
| giobox wrote:
| Cellphones are placed amazingly well to provide this sort of
| search. Seeing the post about BeOS and its amazing metadata-
| driven BFS filesystem yesterday really makes you think what
| might have been had iOS and Android been more ambitious about
| filesystems instead of just re-applying the same old
| conventions from our desktop computers.
|
| You should be able to just text search every phone call you
| have made on iOS/Android, today, similar to the automated
| voicemail transcription features already present etc etc.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| Here's a 24/7 background audio recorder app I made for Android.
| The impact on battery and storage is surprisingly reasonable.
|
| https://github.com/miguelrochefort/eardrum
| tomerbd wrote:
| What a nice pair of feet!
| Lapsa wrote:
| yeah but there's 3 toasts
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Interesting work, glad to see I am not the only crazy one left in
| the life logging scene after all these years. Have been
| lifelogging since 2004-ish, and built a few custom bits of
| software and hardware to support it. I don't record 24x7 anymore,
| but I used to. Now my recordings are limited mostly to my office
| environment, and when I am out and about using a Sensecam-like
| device with custom firmware. When in my office I capture video,
| audio and depth data from multiple view points, along with images
| of the desktop of whatever computer I am on, and process most of
| it on a Jetson.
|
| How's the audio quality on those devices you link to in other
| comments? I find I pick up a lot of ambient noise when outside of
| the office, and always struggled to come up with a viable
| algorithm and model to differentiate "background chatter" from
| the main conversation, and it is a problem I've never really
| managed to solve so I am interested in your experiences on the
| subject.
| roberdam wrote:
| > Have been lifelogging since 2004-ish
|
| Hopefully new advances in AI will let you try new things with
| your old recordings
|
| > How's the audio quality on those devices you link to in other
| comments?
|
| Decent, quality is directly proportional to the distance
| between the microphone and the mouth, but can't expect too much
| from 30$ devices.
|
| >and always struggled to come up with a viable algorithm and
| model to differentiate "background chatter" from the main
| conversation
|
| Yes, that's a big problem to solve, you can try Pyannote's
| Diarization https://lablab.ai/t/whisper-transcription-and-
| speaker-identi...
|
| that will be a next step for the experience
| [deleted]
| L0in wrote:
| Do you mind sharing your experience, why you started, what you
| want to get out of this etc? I'm interested to read your
| experience.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Not interested.
| askafriend wrote:
| Have you seen the show "My Strange Addiction"?
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Anybody made some progress with using google assistant with
| arbitrary commands? I know there are a few integrators online
| that could, in theory, get commands and send them to a
| spreadsheet, but I couldn't get them to work.
| colordrops wrote:
| Did I miss something or is a description and/or link to the
| software used not in the article?
| Tepix wrote:
| You can download whisper at https://github.com/openai/whisper
| roberdam wrote:
| You can use you smartphone for the recording and transcribe it
| here: https://replicate.com/openai/whisper
|
| regex to extract commands from the transcripted text
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Are you planning to combine it with other info? Your smartwatch
| already knows how long you've slept, getting that info directly
| to your database seems more efficient and less error prone. The
| same goes for the amount of money you've spend, if your bank
| allows you to export that info it'll save you a step. Your bank
| doesn't know what you've bought, only the total cost, time and
| shop, but if you scan and upload your receipts and use ocr you'll
| have a detailed record of that too.
|
| And you could also keep track of your location, so you know where
| you had a conversation or at what gas station you spend 250,000
| roberdam wrote:
| Diarization might be my next step,(recognizing the speaker on
| the recording).
|
| Combining the information from multiple sources as you say will
| get you a complete view (location history and time of the
| recording will let you know if you where speaking with a
| college or your spouse for example)
| skydoctor wrote:
| Anyone familiar with rewind.ai which seems to be building a
| product on similar lines?
| rmac wrote:
| Looks like a slick wrapper around Apple's ImageAnalyzer and
| ScreenCaptureKit
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you are going through that much trouble you might as well get
| a WiFi scale, wear a tracker that has an API, etc. I've
| definitely thought about taking speech-to-text notes at work,
| nice to see somebody did it.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Well yes, but this is a much cheaper option. Instead of having
| many smart gadgets you only need one. The mobile phone or some
| other microphone but that is the most obvious option.
|
| Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for all these gadgets
| that have to be charged and kept safe you can buy cheap
| variants and still have basically the same benefits.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| But your time is exchangable for money. (Something almost
| never reflected in hobby behavior: that's why the crafts
| store has 130 kinds of acrylic yarn and 1 kind of wool yarn.)
|
| A $150 scale is expensive but buys a very small amount of
| software development.
| fellerts wrote:
| The problem is all those gadgets have their own APIs and
| quirks. For example, my WiFi scale often decides to silently
| not sync to my phone. Or decides to update my partner's weight
| instead of mine. OP is building on arguably the most natural
| API - speech, which is what all those smart assistants have
| been promising us for a decade. I think there is a lot of
| convenience as well as unexplored ground to be found in such a
| system.
| jes5199 wrote:
| for a while I had my laptop set up to take a photograph and and
| screenshot every ten minutes. The information was completely
| useless, but I got some great candid photos of myself
| c1sc0 wrote:
| Are there any good (discrete) wireless throat mic patches out
| there that are sensitive enough to pick up subvocalization /
| whispering?
| philote wrote:
| I was curious about this as well. It seems there are bone
| conducting microphones, but the ones I've found so far go in
| your ear (so it's visible). I'm going to just hide a mic in my
| beard.
| roberdam wrote:
| Since everyone is interested in the hardware:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803349510543.html
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803085687061.html
|
| the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the
| size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios,
| several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for
| one that can have a lavalier microphone
| uncletammy wrote:
| Yeah but I want the software! Will you open source it? I'd
| contribute!
| roberdam wrote:
| I'm doing it simple for now, transcribe it by uploading the
| files to colab or replicate.com, then using regex to extract
| the commands, the panel is in rails but nothing fancy so far.
|
| As I clarify in the article: This is a "proof of concept" and
| not yet ready for production, everything described here works
| but probably "glued with tape", several of the processes are
| probably not automated or polished.
| [deleted]
| narag wrote:
| Thank you for the links and for the article. How long can
| record the smaller one? Actually if it can record for a day,
| it'd be enough for me.
|
| I used to record all phone calls, until EU made Xiaomi remove
| the feature. It was very useful because I always could take
| notes later if they sent me a number, contact name or
| appointment hour.
| roberdam wrote:
| At 128kbps the MP3 takes about 56mb per hour, I got the 16gb,
| so you have a lot of time, the battery of the smaller one I
| read is 800 mAh , according to the docs should last around
| 2hrs, but I try to recharge it as soon as I can
| philote wrote:
| The Ali Express link says "Continuous recording:20hours". But
| since they offer sizes from 4GB to 32GB it's unclear which
| storage size that's for. That 20 hours could also be how long
| the battery will last while recording. But 20 hours is still
| enough to last the day and then some.
| gruez wrote:
| It's probably the battery life. 128 kb/s AAC is effectively
| transparent even for music, and only translates to 1.1GB.
| Even if it's uncompressed (1 channel 16 bit 44100hz PCM),
| 20 hours only translates to 6.35 GB.
| cbsks wrote:
| Super cool project! How do you carry the microphones on your
| person? The big one looks like it wouldn't clip to a shirt very
| easily. Does it pick up your voice from your pocket?
| roberdam wrote:
| thanks!, I try it on my shirt pocket but now I have it
| hanging from my neck with a badge rope as close to the mouth
| as I can
| [deleted]
| nelsonenzo wrote:
| I wanted to do this exact project - record audio all day and
| then have AI process it - to identify behavior outburst of my
| autistic toddler.
|
| It's critical information for early diagnosis and treatment,
| but it's really hard to capture the data while also dealing
| with the actual situation. Being able to send the sounds he
| makes to his therapist could also be usefull when then are
| trying to get him to mimic sounds and talk.
|
| With that said, is the audio AI open sourced? The part that
| analyzes the audio stream?
|
| Thanks for the links to the hardware, also a really important
| part!
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I would guess that they're using OpenAI's Whisper, which is
| open source: https://github.com/openai/whisper
|
| It does speech-to-text, then you can use the full force of
| all the text analysis tools that are out there.
| roberdam wrote:
| that's a fantastic use case!, the easiest way (and the one
| i'm currently using) is by upload the audio manually on :
|
| https://replicate.com/openai/whisper
| macrolime wrote:
| Are you planning to make it an open source project?
| roberdam wrote:
| for now it's "glued with tape", but I'm going to try to make it
| presentable to post something on Github
| luwatobil wrote:
| Please do, this is a very cool project and I would like to
| give it a try.
| fire wrote:
| I'm looking forward to it!
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I remember an Asimov short story in which scientists developed a
| machine that could see backward in time.
|
| If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became
| terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the
| past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore
| functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| Different author, but sounds somewhat similar to 'The Light of
| Other Days' by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
|
| Although iirc correctly it starts with being able to see other
| locations in space but at the same time, and the historical
| viewing is a second development.
|
| Fantastic book, even if it's not the same one you were thinking
| of.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Pretty sure both those authors wrote similar concepts, with
| the same creepy conclusions of taking the technology to a
| limit.
|
| It came up in an acoustics class once. I said that sound
| never really dies. It just bounces around until it becomes
| thermal energy, thus warming the room a little as a prelude
| to joking about professors talking hot air.
|
| A student asked whether, one could recover sound from
| reverberations that had fallen below RT60? Could you listen
| back in time to conversations that had happened hours ago?
|
| Obviously entropy can't be put back in the box with the
| technology we have now, but it makes you wonder.
|
| Two things have since made me revise the question. One is
| recovery of sound from video images. The other was an
| archaeological recovery of sounds from a ceramic vase spun on
| potters wheel many centuries ago. Sorry but the references
| for both escape me atm.
| progman32 wrote:
| The pottery record thing was tested on mythbusters and
| hailed from an episode of csi.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Fake? Got a link so I can dig in a bit. Thanks.
|
| EDIT: found this thread
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/sci.archaeology.moderated/c/5
| Jec...
|
| Damnit, seemed so plausible.
| abruzzi wrote:
| Clark also used it as a throwaway line in Childhood's End.
| IIRC, humans were given a device that would allow them to see
| the past--most religions didn't survive seeing the true
| origins of their faith.
| andrewla wrote:
| It was The Dead Past [1]
|
| The idea of it was that it was known that the technology
| existed, but the government went to great lengths to imply that
| it could only see into the far distant past. The reality was it
| could only see 20 years back or so, and the government was
| covering it up because of the 1000 milllisecond issue.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Yes, that was it! Nice find :)
| creativeembassy wrote:
| I wonder if this was an inspiration to the "Devs" miniseries.
| Won't say more about it for fear of ruining it. Amazing show.
| lbayes wrote:
| There was an article some years ago (2 or 3?), that described a
| drone (or drones?) that flew 24/7 over Mexico city taking high
| resolution video of the entire city at all times.
|
| Whenever there was a crime, the police could zoom into that
| location at the time of the crime and then run backwards to see
| where the vehicles came from. They then knocked on that door.
|
| I'm disappointed that I can't seem to find it using Google
| anymore, maybe it was from a movie or TV show?! That would be
| weird though, because it seems technically quite reasonable to
| achieve and hard to believe governments wouldn't jump on it.
| netsharc wrote:
| I've read about that happening in Cleveland, using tech
| developed to find insurgents leaving IEDs in Afghanistan.
| Yeah, citation needed...
| lbayes wrote:
| So glad someone else saw this, I'm not finding _anything_
| on it and I 'm starting to question my own memory, as I'm
| quite sure I saw the original article about the Mexico
| program on this site.
|
| FWIW, I also recall the tech being originally used to find
| people who planted IEDs in Afghanistan.
|
| I'm kind of shocked about how all the articles I am finding
| seem to emphasize real-time police chases.
|
| Now I'm feeling super suspicious.
| _tom_ wrote:
| There have been a few products that record everything you
| see on the web, so you don't have this problem. Obviously
| analogous to recording everything you hear.
|
| https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-about-seruku-
| search-...
| netsharc wrote:
| Well, a bit more googling ( https://www.google.com/search
| ?q=police+drone+afghanistan+rew... ) got me just 2
| relevant hits.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sher
| iff...
|
| https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl
| e=1... (search for "rewind")
|
| I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those
| keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my
| metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.
| lbayes wrote:
| Nice job!
|
| Your tips got me to this one, where it more clearly
| spells out the "rewind" capability. I think the problem
| was that the tech was attached to a low-flying, piloted
| plane, not drones.
|
| https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226742/record-and-
| rewind-...
|
| Whew! It feels better to set my tinfoil hat down on the
| table next to me...
| filoeleven wrote:
| There was a website shown on HN a few years ago that used
| AI and plane transponder data to find circling planes
| which were presumably doing this kind of surveillance
| over American cities. It might have used further
| parameters to narrow it down, e.g. "over a city, circling
| for >3 hours" to rule out planes waiting to land. I
| thought it was named something simple like "plane-
| circles.com" but I'm not having any luck finding it
| again.
|
| See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
|
| Edit: found it. Should have limited the search to HN from
| the start. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661
| dorkwood wrote:
| I first heard about this on Radiolab. Maybe you heard it
| there too?
|
| >> In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to
| roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an
| idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they
| figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all
| day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto
| that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been
| there all along, they could scroll back in time and see -
| literally see - who planted it.
|
| https://radiolab.org/episodes/eye-sky
| garblegarble wrote:
| The term for this is 'WAMI' - Wide Area Motion Imagery[1].
| Here's a Bloomberg article about an instance of it in
| Baltimore[2] (although this wasn't where I learned about it
| first, like you I can't find my original source either)
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
|
| 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-
| sur...
| iwillbenice wrote:
| Not sure about the Mexico City drone, but a similar thing was
| developed by the US military:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
|
| I know some folks who deployed during OEF/OIF and used these
| types of systems. Many a night raids were conducted simply by
| watching where attackers originated from.
| [deleted]
| bitcurious wrote:
| In some jurisdictions it's illegal to record a conversation
| without all-party consent. Example:
|
| https://www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/massachusetts...
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Pretty well known in the states, luckily he seems to be talking
| to himself :)
| alach11 wrote:
| These states are: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois,
| Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire,
| Pennsylvania, and Washington.
|
| Edit: I should add that in some of those states, it would still
| be permitted to record others in public without consent, where
| there's no reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g. a coffee
| shop or gas station).
| [deleted]
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so
| affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware
| of the recording.
|
| Hm. Will a T-shirt with "my phone is recording everything" be
| enough?
|
| Interesting- secret recording is punished more severely than
| _use_ of such recording. Logic?
|
| Also, the difference between image and sound recording. Secret
| image recording in public space is basically ok, while sound
| recording is not. That probably is caused by a wide
| availability of photo cameras, with known "fair uses".
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| No. It's not enough to vaguely inform people.
|
| You must get their consent. T-shirts say lots of things that
| are hyperbole or bluster. Like "official boob inspector" is
| not generally understood to mean that you're announcing you
| literally are a licensed doctor.
| krzyk wrote:
| A related question, is there a ready solution to do constant
| recording using some Linux box (e.g. Raspberry PI)?
|
| AFAIR I've seen someone recommended such software on HN but I
| can't find it right now, it was something for recording radio
| stations or similar.
|
| I would like to get some kind of sound monitoring of my house
| when I'm away or sleeping and besides using arecord I couldn't
| find anything useful.
| reisub0 wrote:
| Even better is something like the Guardian Project's
| Haven(https://github.com/guardianproject/haven) which IIRC
| Snowden contributed to.
|
| It's incredibly cost-effective to just buy an old Android phone
| (which comes integrated with multiple microphones, with good
| signal processing and noise cancellation), instead of building
| it with components.
|
| Haven is specifically designed for intrusion detection, and for
| preventing people from tampering with your laptop for instance
| by detecting activity on the Android phone's sensors.
| habibur wrote:
| An old laptop will work better.
|
| Raspberry pis don't have Audio in. You need USB microphone and
| drivers, which are hit or miss.
| krzyk wrote:
| Well yeah, but I wonder what software to use for constant
| recording that could be worked on outside of the recording
| process.
| jxy wrote:
| I was playing with this idea of recording everything using a
| 1st gen AIY voice kit. The driver is a linux kernel builtin
| module. The recording quality is good if I'm in the same
| room. But I didn't find the recording that useful, so I
| stopped doing that.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I thought this would be recording everything to generate an AI
| model that could sit in zoom meetings for you.
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