[HN Gopher] Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice...
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Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests
shipped to cloud
Author : johnshades
Score : 326 points
Date : 2025-03-18 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| ffhhj wrote:
| We should make AI generated conversations to overload their
| surveillance.
| ohgr wrote:
| I imagine an Alexa customer would have a net loss financially
| from the model execution costs if they just sent garbage all
| day. Doesn't even need to be clever.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Just play SpongeBob extra loud elsewhere in the house.
| airstrike wrote:
| Not if you run it locally and power it with solar?
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| Waste of time. Find something else constructive to do.
| dexter_it wrote:
| I'd be interested to see the percentage of users who have the "Do
| Not Send Voice Recordings" feature enabled. My guess is .001% or
| less
| walterbell wrote:
| It's useful to control local Zigbee devices without depending
| on internet.
|
| Echo Plus is a Zigbee hub with US-origin firmware.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Since only a minority of users want any modicum of privacy,
| guess it makes sense to remove the option for everybody.
|
| Also ignoring the dark patterns in which big tech will make it
| annoying/obfuscated/unknown that better privacy options are
| available.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It isn't an option for older devices anyway. The hardware for
| on-device processing was only in some recent models.
|
| I think it's likely that they looked at the numbers and
| realized they were spending a lot of money putting NPUs on
| devices and maintaining separate voice parsing models for a
| very small minority of users.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Recent conversation about this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268
| neilv wrote:
| Related: _The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you
| enabled no longer available (discuss.systems) | 929 points by luu
| 1 day ago | 664 comments |_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268
| robotnikman wrote:
| Yep, gonna unplug my Alexa tonight now. Maybe I'll try setting up
| openHAB for controlling my smart lights.
| tommoor wrote:
| Related - is anyone working on an open home assistant? Google,
| Apple, Amazon are all taking so long to bring latest advancements
| across to their products
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There _was_ Mycroft AI. Not sure what ever became of that.
| lexlash wrote:
| Died fighting off a patent troll: https://www.theregister.com
| /2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistant_ki...
| accrual wrote:
| Open Home Assistant has a voice module. I haven't personally
| tried it, though.
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/
| cyptus wrote:
| I did! with their own new hardware (https://www.home-
| assistant.io/voice-pe/) sadly the microphones are way worse
| than e.g. in an alexa speaker. Also the performance of the
| ,,voice pipelines" (stt, llm, tts) are a bit of a pain
| because they are all in sequence and not e.g. using stream
| features.
| chneu wrote:
| Yeah home Assistant is going through some voice/AI hiccups
| at the moment. They're updating to LLM and it's sorta half
| implemented.
| accrual wrote:
| I only have one Alexa and it won't bother me to remove it or
| replace it with another HomePod. I only use it to check the
| weather and occasionally to listen to random facts while I get
| ready in the morning. The fact that it has a digital clock is a
| nice bonus that HomePods don't yet have, though.
| locusofself wrote:
| I would be excited if Apple would add great GPT answering
| capabilities on my first-gen homepods, even if it meant having to
| send all queries to the cloud. I can unplug them if I need
| privacy.
| colkassad wrote:
| Years ago after getting one I was messing around in settings on
| Amazon's Alexa website and noticed a log of commands/messages
| sent to Alexa. I reviewed them and was horrified to see "why does
| daddy always beat me". Best to let your daughter win at Uno in
| this age of always-on connectivity. Or just unplug it, which is
| what I did.
| Aurornis wrote:
| There's some important nuance here: All commands (after
| trigger/wake word) were sent to the cloud in the past anyway.
|
| The option to do some on-device processing came on later
| devices and, as I understand it, wasn't even enabled by
| default. Furthermore, on-device processing would still send the
| parsed commands to the cloud.
|
| The headline is vague, but it's misleading a lot of people into
| thinking that only _now_ Amazon will start sending commands to
| the cloud. It 's actually always been that way. I suspect the
| number of people who enabled on-device processing was very,
| very small.
| luma wrote:
| I'm shocked that not one single article I've found mentioned
| this incredibly obvious fact. This has ALWAYS been the case
| and only a few select models ever offered the option to turn
| it off. This change puts all devices on equal footing and
| behavior with the launch device.
|
| I don't love Amazon, but I love ginned up outrage over tech
| the author never bothered to understand even less.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I knew someone that used to work on the Alexa team on the
| language side of things. She had an emotionally terrible few
| weeks at one stage, because she and her team had to brainstorm
| (working in conjunction with experts) on just about every
| possible way users might ask questions that indicate they're
| being abused, so that they could provide suitable responses.
| Glad to have worked on it, but it was heart wrenching in many
| regards.
| boznz wrote:
| This should be a godsend to any FOSS home assistants out there.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| This Amazon step may make someone else very rich
| lukasb wrote:
| I don't understand why Alexa/Siri etc don't just keep their
| hardcoded rules for things like "set an alarm" and only ship
| things to a cloud LLM if they don't match a rule.
| mulderc wrote:
| Because that is harder and gives a less consistent experience.
| lukasb wrote:
| It is more complexity than just "ship everything to an LLM
| and use tool calls", but the payoff - perfect behavior, along
| with offline support, for your most common inputs - is worth
| it I think.
|
| I disagree about things being less consistent. Let's imagine
| a 100% LLM world - in this world, you use a bunch of training
| to try to get the LLM to match your hardcoded responses for
| common inputs. If you get your training really right, you get
| 100% accuracy for these inputs. In this world, no one is
| complaining about consistency! So why not just hardcode that
| behavior?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The whole benefit of LLMs is that _humans_ are not
| consistent enough. Or at least Apple, Amazon, Google and
| Microsoft all believe normies _don 't want to be_
| consistent enough to speak the most common input the same
| way, allowing to use much simpler and efficient approaches
| to voice input - like the ones that worked off-line _15+
| years ago_ on a regular PC.
|
| LLMs are actually the only reason I'd consider processing
| voice in the cloud to be a good idea. Alas, knowing how the
| aforementioned companies designed their assistants in the
| past, I'm certain they'll find a way to _degrade the
| experience_ and strip most of the benefits of having LLMs
| in the loop. After all, as past experience shows, you can
| 't have an assistant letting you operate commercial
| products and services without speaking the brand names out
| loud. That's unthinkable.
| neuralspark wrote:
| Siri does this for some simpler requests.
| jedberg wrote:
| With the Alexa devices that have local processing hardware,
| that is exactly what happened (prior to this change, if you had
| the local only option set).
|
| But now, in the age of LLMs, there are no "simple rules". An
| example. Say you live in San Francisco:
|
| "Alexa, I'm thinking of going to New York, how many flights are
| there each day?"
|
| This is a hard question, and one that will go to the cloud.
|
| "Alexa, what's the weather"
|
| This seems like an easy question. But with local only
| processing, you'd get the weather in San Francisco. But with
| the LLM, it will probably give you the weather in New York,
| which is most likely what you wanted if you asked these things
| just a few seconds apart.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Put your iPhone in airplane mode and disable WiFi - most of the
| basic stuff like 'set an alarm', 'start a timer', etc. will
| still work. This has been the case for several years - offline
| Siri was one of the big things they added in iOS 15.
|
| [0]https://www.macworld.com/article/678307/how-to-use-siri-
| offl...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Lots of discussions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536
| walterbell wrote:
| 500 million Alexa-enabled devices were sold, hopefully some can
| be repurposed and kept out of landfills.
|
| Updating Echo Dot V1 to newer kernel:
| https://andrerh.gitlab.io/echoroot/
|
| Echo Dot V2 Android tinkering,
| https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki/Echo-Dot-v2 &
| https://andygoetz.org/tags/dot/ &
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IEMVDebzE
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| These devices never supported local processing anyways, right?
| So, no change there?
| walterbell wrote:
| If older devices can be modified, voice audio could be sent
| to non-cloud Linux/Mac for Whisper transcription to text
| command.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You would think we could actually do all voice processing locally
| now? The models that do voice, speech, and language processing
| aren't that big...an 8b model would be completely feasible for an
| affordable device, if not home server.
| jedberg wrote:
| You can process the voice to text locally, but it's what you do
| with the text afterwards that is done in the cloud.
|
| In the age of LLMs, even a simple request like "set a timer" is
| sent to the cloud so that it can be processed in the context of
| what you've said previously, what devices you own, what time of
| day it is, etc. etc.
|
| And FWIW, you will get a better voice to text in the cloud
| because that model will know about your device names and other
| details. For example, if you say, "turn on the kitchen light",
| the cloud knows you have a light called "kitchen", so if you
| slur a bit it can still figure it out.
| timschmidt wrote:
| All of that could as easily be done locally. The Echo speaker
| is likely the hub for the IoT device controlling the kitchen
| light. None of the context you speak of requires "cloud".
| jedberg wrote:
| > All of that could as easily be done locally
|
| It cannot. Keep in mind that the Alexa devices are built to
| be as cheap as possible, so they have minimum amounts of
| RAM and CPU. The tiniest of models can barely fit on the
| device.
|
| > The Echo speaker is likely the hub for the IoT device
| controlling the kitchen light.
|
| Generally the devices that are controlled by Alexa are done
| via Wifi from the provider of the device using their own
| APIs. Very few "Works with Alexa" devices can be controlled
| locally. But yes, some of them can. However, the Alexa
| device doesn't know it is called "kitchen".
|
| > None of the context you speak of requires "cloud".
|
| I just gave you a simple example. Here is a better one that
| I used down below:
|
| Say you live in San Francisco:
|
| "Alexa, I'm thinking of going to New York, how many flights
| are there each day?"
|
| This is a hard question, and one that will go to the cloud.
|
| "Alexa, what's the weather"
|
| This seems like an easy question. But with local only
| processing, you'd get the weather in San Francisco. But
| with the LLM, it will probably give you the weather in New
| York, which is most likely what you wanted if you asked
| these things just a few seconds apart.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Funny that Home Assistant seems to manage.
|
| Every point you made is a choice that was engineered into
| the system to impose dependence.
| acchow wrote:
| How would it be aware of everything else I have and do
| online? Calendar, emails, YouTube history, current
| audiobook, etc?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| There seems to be some tremendous confusion here. The vast
| majority of Alexa-family devices perform no local processing
| except for the activation word ("Alexa"). I didn't even realize
| that some of the more recent devices supported an opt-in for
| local processing.
|
| This kind of makes sense, at least to me: local processing will
| always be limited. The entire premise of the original Echo
| devices was that all the magic happened in the cloud. It seems
| like not much has really changed?
| walterbell wrote:
| Echo devices since 2021 include hardware NPU for local voice
| processing to text,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43368008
| edhelas wrote:
| pikachu_surprised.jpg
| replete wrote:
| I've noticed since getting a new mac, that on-device dictation is
| no longer possible, a modal pops up forcing you to hit agree in
| order to get dictation. Never clicking that.
|
| The direction of major operating systems neutering themselves in
| favour of deep service integration does not fill one with hope
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It's almost enough to make me try Linux on the desktop again.
| agildehaus wrote:
| Do it. Quite a bit has improved in the last few years and
| I've entirely replaced Windows.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Ehhh but I just bought one of the M4 Mac minis. And it's
| pretty nice.
| dnzm wrote:
| Keep an eye on [Asahi Linux](https://asahilinux.org/),
| then. A cursory glance shows Me support not being
| complete yet, but I assume it will be in time (and the
| missing stuff may or may not be a show stopper _for you_
| ).
| thfuran wrote:
| Is asahi expected to work on them soon, or is it still a
| few Ms behind?
| gmassman wrote:
| It's always the year of the linux desktop!
| inetknght wrote:
| I run Linux on my personal computers.
|
| Word of warning: businesses, possibly including your
| employer, may consider you to be a robot, or a terrorist, or
| tell you to install Windows, or tell you to use your phone,
| or tell you that you have no right to privacy.
|
| I recently had to go through a background check for a
| prospective employer. The background check website wouldn't
| even load. The support agent told me that it's a Firefox
| problem and told me that I needed to open the website on
| Chrome or Edge or on my phone, and that the website is
| working "perfectly". Alas, it worked fine with Firefox on
| Linux, as long as the user-agent reported that it's actually
| Chrome and Windows.
|
| Yeah the website is indeed working "perfectly": perfectly
| enough to block employment of people who care about privacy.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I keep one Windows or Mac around always for work specific
| things, if Linux is unsupported I can switch. Heck you
| could get a free Windows dev VM from Microsoft (they rotate
| them out every 3 months).
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Heck you could get a free Windows dev VM from
| Microsoft_
|
| You gotta accept Microsoft's licenses and EULAs and crap
| like that. Plus it's still spyware. No thanks
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| Also the VM install images have been pulled off of their
| page since october...
|
| https://developer.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/downloads/virt...
|
| >Due to ongoing technical issues, as of October 23, 2024,
| downloads are temporarily unavailable.
|
| They are morons.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's not just about us, it's about less-technical people
| who might adopt libre operating systems if they're easy
| to use, but not if web services intentionally refuse to
| do business with them.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I was on POP for two years now, I switched to an Arch
| derivative called EndeavourOS which makes installing Arch a
| breeze. I did discover someone working on an Atomic version
| of Arch (where the core OS is frozen for a set period of
| time, to ensure total stability, and nothing can break during
| this window) called Arkane Linux, which I might try.
|
| I have no intention of returning to Windows.
| darkwater wrote:
| I was just forced to migrate to MacOS in my new job and I
| can't really understand developers saying that Linux is not
| usable as a desktop machine. For me, it's the other way
| round.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Run whisper locally
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's not true -- on-device dictation works just fine. You can
| verify for yourself by turning off WiFi/Internet and dictation
| works identically. As long as you have a modern enough Mac that
| supports local dictation, of course. (Older Macs were _only_
| cloud dictation, I remember.)
|
| The popup on my MacBook says specifically:
|
| > _When you use Dictation, your device will indicate in
| Keyboard Settings if your audio and transcripts are processed
| on your device and not sent to Apple servers. Otherwise, the
| things you dictate are sent to and processed on the server, but
| will not be stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri and
| Dictation._
| re wrote:
| > _your device will indicate in Keyboard Settings if your
| audio and transcripts are processed on your device and not
| sent to Apple servers_
|
| I have a reasonably recent (<2yo) MBP, which feels like it
| ought to be "modern enough", and in Keyboard Settings, it
| says "Dictation sends information like your voice input,
| contacts, and location to Apple to process your requests." It
| doesn't say anything about processing happening on my device.
| Yes, off-line dictation does work for me (with Wi-Fi turned
| off), but I'm curious under what conditions Keyboard Settings
| would say something about transcripts _not_ being sent to
| Apple.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Throw your wiretap in the garbage where it belongs.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Why? It's to useful to "belong" in the garbage.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It's useful only to let big tech companies listen in to
| everything that happens in your home.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| It's better to stop the flow of Big Brother-like privacy
| violations and repurpose it to do something useful than add to
| e-waste.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I mean, it seems that local hardware can be a limiting factor on
| the quality of the LLMs you can deploy. Why should they shoot
| their feet?
|
| Even Apple did open their AI system to OpenAI (and potentially
| other vendors in the future).
|
| As long as there is explicit consent to do so, it is fine. Nobody
| forces you to buy an Alexa product.
| firtoz wrote:
| There's a way to download all of your Alexa requests. I recommend
| it to everyone. It was interesting and horrifying to get
| literally all of them, from day 1. I noticed how tired I sound in
| the mornings or evenings. I started understanding patterns of my
| thoughts and needs. The Alexa went to the bin quickly after that
| session of exploration and insight.
| misterbwong wrote:
| Link for those that are interested:
| https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/prev...
|
| Be advised it's not instant.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The Alexa went to the bin quickly after that session of
| exploration and insight._
|
| Why? It sounds like it was really interesting and valuable to
| observe those patterns.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Presumably because it is a privacy hazard to have someone
| else storing that kind of data about you
| firtoz wrote:
| Exactly.
| scubbo wrote:
| Precisely because it _was_ so interesting and valuable to
| observe those patterns - for the corporation observing them.
| firtoz wrote:
| Exactly.
| amelius wrote:
| Heh, you can do the same with your Google searches. Equally
| horrifying, I suppose.
| admiralrohan wrote:
| What if the internet is off?
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Okay with this level of integration in daily, private life (able
| to record background noise not related to the
| request...potentially or actually), consider this:
|
| Is Alexa hearing a gunshot a request for assistance? It's not a
| voice command, okay, but where does "oh that's not our business"
| really end in vast data collection platforms such as this? Does
| Alexa have any duty to report voice requests about self-harm?
| cpersona wrote:
| Pure anecdote, but it reminds me of that time, I mentioned on a
| call that a particular piece of code was a time bomb waiting to
| explode, only to have Alexa wake up and listen as I was standing
| nearby and noticed the light. I immediately disconnected it and
| never looked back.
| UberFly wrote:
| Wow. Our phones all do the same thing there's no doubt.
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