Will this gadget spy on me?
- Thread starter Zoomx
- Start date
Assistants don't listen to every word the way you think.
They listen to a keyword. In this case, Alexa. They listen for that word while offline. Once they recognise this word, they now start listening for real for your inquiry and transmit your inquiry to amazon servers for processing then you get an answer.
You have an assistant on your phone or laptop. Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. They don't listen unless they hear Hey Siri or Ok Google. Otherwise, your microphone is always on.
You can prove this yourself. Set up Siri or Google Assistant. Clear your data usage. Trigger it up by saying Ok Google/Siri. Make lots of queries. Now go see your data usage.
It is about 10mb for 5 minutes of enquiry from Google assistant . Just imagine if it was listening all the time for real as uninformed people and rumor mongers claim. 10*12*24 is over 2.5GB per day of Google assistant always listening. There is no one on earth having his 2.5GB worth of data being siphoned per day and they don't know.
The second reason why digital assistants can't listen all the time the way people think is that they don't have the processing power to process what you are saying. That is why they need internet connection to transmit your voice for language processing. They can only do precoded set of instructions offline.
They listen to a keyword. In this case, Alexa. They listen for that word while offline. Once they recognise this word, they now start listening for real for your inquiry and transmit your inquiry to amazon servers for processing then you get an answer.
You have an assistant on your phone or laptop. Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. They don't listen unless they hear Hey Siri or Ok Google. Otherwise, your microphone is always on.
You can prove this yourself. Set up Siri or Google Assistant. Clear your data usage. Trigger it up by saying Ok Google/Siri. Make lots of queries. Now go see your data usage.
It is about 10mb for 5 minutes of enquiry from Google assistant . Just imagine if it was listening all the time for real as uninformed people and rumor mongers claim. 10*12*24 is over 2.5GB per day of Google assistant always listening. There is no one on earth having his 2.5GB worth of data being siphoned per day and they don't know.
The second reason why digital assistants can't listen all the time the way people think is that they don't have the processing power to process what you are saying. That is why they need internet connection to transmit your voice for language processing. They can only do precoded set of instructions offline.
That's my point.
There is no compression on earth that can compress voice into very small chunks. If they were listening 24 hours then waiting to send the voice recording, people's phones would be uploading 3GB worth of files everyday.
That's is what I said earlier btw. I just repeated myself once again. Did you not understand my data usage test? It's based on people thinking that google uploads their voice recordings 24/7. Dude, if you recorded your voice for 24hours, it would amount to 10GB. Convert that to Opus format, and you have about 7GB to upload daily. Most phones don't even have that free storage so they can't record data to upload later.
Android is open source btw. You can download it without Google Apps and check the code itself. You can also install a firewall and check data being transmitted to and from your phone.
There is no compression on earth that can compress voice into very small chunks. If they were listening 24 hours then waiting to send the voice recording, people's phones would be uploading 3GB worth of files everyday.
That's is what I said earlier btw. I just repeated myself once again. Did you not understand my data usage test? It's based on people thinking that google uploads their voice recordings 24/7. Dude, if you recorded your voice for 24hours, it would amount to 10GB. Convert that to Opus format, and you have about 7GB to upload daily. Most phones don't even have that free storage so they can't record data to upload later.
Android is open source btw. You can download it without Google Apps and check the code itself. You can also install a firewall and check data being transmitted to and from your phone.