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Essential Home is an Amazon Echo Competitor That 'Puts Privacy First' (theverge.com)
In its bid to take on Apple, Google and Amazon, Essential has unveiled "Home," a new intelligent assistant that it hopes owners will be proud to show off. From a report: Essential Home is the new intelligent assistant with round "auto-display" just announced by Andy Rubin's new venture. It can be activated with a question, a tap, or even a "glance," according to Essential, and it's designed to never intrude upon the home. In that way Essential calls it "an entirely new type of product" but it mostly borrows ideas from existing products in an attempt to outdo them. Essential Home lets your control your music, ask general interest questions, set timers, and control your lights -- capabilities we've seen from Google and Amazon -- only Essential promises to do it better, somehow. It's like Google Home or Amazon's Echo series of assistants only without the "boxes, tubes, or strange lights." It's like Nest but it doesn't try to make your home smart by anticipating your needs -- it suggests certain behaviors instead. "In the end people decide," says Essential. Earlier today, the company also announced the Essential Phone. Unlike the Essential Phone, however, much about the Essential Home is not know. It is expected to ship in a few months.
From the guy who turned the Washington Post into a tabloid. But surely just because he lies in the news doesn't mean he'll lie about your privacy. Your conversations are 100% private between you, Amazon, and Amazon's chosen partners and affiliates.
My question is will these devices collect user information and phone it home to the company? Will it spy on its "owner"?
From the article: "What Essential Home is exactly, isn’t clear."
So, why does this article exit, and why is it on Slashdot?
I don't respond to AC's.
This article exit because it enter.
Sounds like a store brand for Target.
So, why does this article exit, and why is it on Slashdot?
Clearly, to clarify the unclarity. Wasn't the clear?
"...it suggests certain behaviors instead. "In the end people decide," says Essential."
People decide? That's a laugh. People are more manipulated by what someone or something else tells them more than ever, to the point where they absolutely rely on it. Can't date without running it through a profiling engine. Can't eat at a restaurant without reviewing the opinions of several million taste buds first. Can't buy products without validating that purchase with a strangers opinion. Create a friendship or relationship from scratch? No way. It must be suggested or recommended by a network of friends of friends first.
TL; DR - A human engaging in cognitive thinking? What the fuck for? - The Future
Because essentially that is the essential story. It is however, not existential.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
When the only two "people" listed for "security" on their entire fucking team - ARE DOGS.
If someone made a voice activated service device that could work with no internet connection, I would bite. Play my MP3s/FLACs on command from a network share, control my lights or TV with an IR blaster, support SIP for VoIP calls, perform internet searches with my preferred provider (if a 'net connection is present). In short - do not connect to the internet unless I tell it to and never transmit my voice unless it's a VoIP call.
Until these devices can do speech-to-text and home control and local resource interaction (your PC, basically) without going out on the net, there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Closest so far is MyCroft. It's modular, it's open source, and so it has the potential to be as good as we want to make it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Very misleading to imply that this device is structurally any different from Google Home/Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant.
It says it is running proactive intelligence locally on the device. OK... but there is no way it's running ASR and NLU locally on a device of this form factor. There may be some notification logic locally on the device, fine, but this is pretty much negligible from a privacy impact perspective.
I can't see this being done properly. To really work, it would have to have no internet connection. But I don't think that is how they do it. Voice recognition and database searching needs a lot of processing power and memory.
Why would nerds use any of these products? It seems like we could do something that's better and a lot more interesting.
There's already open source speech recognition software. It shouldn't be that difficult to have a device listen for commands. If you configure this yourself, you have far more flexibility as to what these commands are and to prevent the device from accidentally (or maliciously) being triggered. Parsing those commands is effectively a series of conditionals, and not really artificial intelligence as it's often marketed.
Returning the result of search queries is simply a matter of forwarding the queries to the appropriate search engine, parsing the results, and acting accordingly. For the United States, it could return current weather and forecasts from the National Weather Service without too much difficulty. That's not hard to do. It wouldn't be all that hard to query flight and train schedules and statuses. There are APIs to interface with things like Google Calendar.
In terms of hardware, you might want to control things like lights, thermostats, and appliances. It wouldn't be difficult at all to play back music or use an IR blaster to tune your TV to play back media stored on a server. I'd bet this is one area where you could significantly exceed the functionality of the commercial products. I also don't see any reason why you couldn't interface it with security cameras and sensors to indicate things like doors being opened. There are open source tools that could be used to detect motion on camera and respond accordingly.
I'm still learning how to implement such a setup to interface with some of the sensors and other hardware from an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. But I like the idea of being able to indicate that I'm going to be away from home for awhile and then get notifications on my phone (and perhaps be able to control aspects of this system remotely).
I really think that nerds could develop custom solutions that are much better than what's currently available. And by better, I mean respecting your privacy, having more features and functionality, and having far more options for customization. It's something I might actually try to do, if I have the time. I have a good feel about how to implement the software for a lot of this, but any information or resources on controlling lights and other switches and interfacing with sensors would definitely be welcome.
Why would I want any of this?
I already have non-wired heating cooling in my house and I don't need my IoT fridge to spy on me while pretending it doesn't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Privacy first is useless if security is not brought and kept at the maximum level. Read "backdoors", "thinkos" and bugs.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'll buy the first one of these that lets me change the activation phrase from whatever the default is to 'computer'
You can't 'Put Privacy First' that is constantly listening for something to trigger it.
OK... but there is no way it's running ASR and NLU locally on a device of this form factor.
I would say, it depends on the expected performances.
There a difference between an (cloud-based) AI that can listen and answer nearly in realtime.
And an AI that react slower, requires a simpler vocabulary, etc.
(but thusly works even if the connection is down).
With the advance in moore's law, the latest gen of small form-factor hardware might be able to run locally some significant deep neural-nets.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think the real story here is more "There's a new company that is announcing some new products that sort of look cool." It's meant to build hype for a more detailed announcement tonight.
In this day and age I don't believe them for a single moment.
MisterHouse has been doing all of that, or at least most of it, for 15-20 years now.
See that "Preview" button?
I don't believe you.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Aye, what is with people lately and especially these guys it seems and product names.
They must have grown up with a lot generic FOOD with the plain white labels...
Fine, I get it, your company name is the name.
What happens when you made another model phone...OtherPhone, BigPhone, LittlePhone?
What about the next model? Phone2? Oh, I know...SMARTPHONE....sigh
The next version of this will be called Home2 or is it HomeALSO?
Perhaps you can have a deluxe version called: Essentials Home Nonessentials? no?
Or are you planning on keeping the name and changing the hardware, cause I hate when WidgetName and WidgetName are 2 entirely different things because one was made the next year.
There isn't a fully themed tablet? There certainly should be.
I see Thinkgeek has the comm badge and halfway there on the communicator but it is redundant. I want a Star Trek flip phone, easy enough. Just add another hinge and stick a keypad under the mic? and stuff.
"There's a new company that is announcing some new products that sort of look cool."
If that is the point, then TFA should have said what is "new" about it. What can it do that Alexa and Google Home can't do? Nothing that I can see. If the only difference is that it is "private" then TFA should have explained what makes it more private (nothing that I can see) and why I should trust this "new" company.
yet can be activated with a question. I dont know what double speak world this comes from, but if you can activate it by asking it a question then it is always listening. If it is always listening then it is always transmitting its data to the cloud for voice analysis and thus in conclusion it does not put privacy first.
marketing speak is deep with this company. Its a shame that the average user will not understand or comprehend this.
capcha: tricking
Where does TFA say anything about privacy, except for the headline.
Sounds like Rubin thinks he can build a phone that's arguably better in many respects than Apple or Samsung, but protecting the privacy of customers/subscribers is not a design goal.
This crap is just so annoying, I can't believe that anybody would take it seriously? Even Siri and the like are irritating and don't get it right all the time. If something isn't 100% then it's junk, and this kind of crap isn't getting anywhere near my house.
Back in the day, someone described baby monitors as devices people use to bug their own homes. A geek with a scanner could hear everything. Now, it is worse. It isn't an asocial geek with a Radio Shack box...but a multinational with limitless resources bugging your home. What could go wrong ?
Hmm well then it failed...I do not feel hyped.
I just saw this and thought...great another er i competitor thats just as bad
Wanna make an assistant AI private?
Essencially *cough*, what is needed is for it to work offline, period. No buts and ifs.
Core AI functionality could get updates overtime to make it more efficient, but no sending data through the Internet while it's in use. A concept that is very easy to understand.
Here's what they put on their page:
"Privacy by design
The home is your own space where you should be able to say what you want, without having to worry about your privacy.
We’ve designed Essential Home to run most things on the device itself, so most data stays in your home where it belongs. Essential Home will directly talk to your devices over your in-home network whenever possible to limit sending data to the cloud".
Most most most. Whenever possible. Blah blah. Doesn't matter. If it's still connecting to servers you have zero control, it's essencially the same as Google Home or Amazon Echo.
It's still our company word versus the other companies word. And for cases like that, it's easier to trust bigger companies that will be risking class action lawsuits over the anger of hundreds of thousands of costumers than an upstart that is just releasing their first products, even if the whole thing is lead by Andy Rubin.
Personally, I don't care for either. I'll be ok with the whole thing if and when AI assistants become fully local.
From https://github.com/MycroftAI/m...:
Once signed and a device is paired, the unit will use our API keys for services, such as the STT (Speech-to-Text) API. It also allows you to use our API keys for weather, Wolfram-Alpha, and various other skills.
So yet another IP-connected, trigger-phrase-activated microphone then. Not interested.
& have I got a bridge in Brooklyn for
you to buy...
With all these new chips being made for Iot and AI and low power embedded, someone will make a cheapish chip with some DSP cores to be able to do more and more off line. It will have to come from the community as the big boys don't want that.
It'll never be as good at sharing data with people you don't know and shouldn't trust, anyway. But the fact that you, a human, can do excellent speech-to-text, means that local software and hardware can get there eventually. And it'll very likely get there faster if that's the goal we preferentially chase.
And we should.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.