Hi, HN! I built a proactive open-source AI necklace that transforms your conversations into summaries, proactive feedback, and insights I built this because I want to use it myself: many companies are advertising such technology but no one is shipping The app can work with or without wearables so you can try the experience without buying anything --- Update: wasn't expecting this post to get attention, so please let me know if I need any special tags like Show HN |
So again, what about people like me?
Sorry, but this is spyware in every sense of the definition. There's no argument against that there.
"Virtual Walls: Protecting Digital Privacy in Pervasive Environments"
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~kotz/research/kapadia-walls/in...
fulfilling that request would make nearly all 'connected' devices untenable.
I absolutely agree with you , but from this point how does that actually happen? how do we shift away from minuscule connected devices that sense everything about the world around them when they come effortlessly cheap and absolutely invaluable?
Please consider whether you should publish something instead of just whether you can.
For what actual gain? What percentage of a normal friendly conversation is something you want to actually review and document. Less than 5%?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeCn7HlLck
Younger ears find it excruciating though.
+2 Charisma +1 Intelligence
A necklace with a helpful spirit living inside a silicon crystal. The spirit grows with every word it hears.
"First you wear it, then it wears you"
For people with memory issues, products like this can be life changing.
On a second note, imagine a world where everyone has perfect memory recall. The concept of "recording" someone is useless, as everyone around a conversation (e.g. sitting at the next table at a cafe) would be a 100% reliable witness to the conversation.
Obviously we would not fault someone for taking steps to train their memory to be better, so why fault them for using electronics to improve the limits of biology?
This describes the plot of a Black Mirror episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050 (S1 E3)
I guess if you're very good at remembering things and have no disabilities, the use-cases are only bad. That said, we shouldn't let assholes fuck things up.
Garbage people are a large and lucrative addressable market.
I’d also wonder about the legal situation; lots of places have laws against the covert recording of phone conversations, but I’m less sure about in-person private conversations.
I really think an open source experience is going to be the only way this specific area will advance (wearable voice assistants). Apple/Google/Amazon are always going to very conventional in how they think about the purpose of their products, how personalized they can be, how much they can be expected to understand the user.
Looking at the Apple prompts, it's notable how uninteresting they are. There is no real theory of function, no sense of relationship or roles. They are just letting that all default to some unspecified common sense (as found in the model), handling only the surface level of these interactions. And they don't appear to bake that into the model because that wouldn't be enough, because those deeper interactions require state that seems pretty clearly to not be specified. Anyway, I'm really going off on a prompting tangent.
I think there is _really_ deep stuff people could be creating using these building blocks. The kinds of developments that are a synthesis of modified personal behavior and the tools provided. A tool this powerful is being wasted (theoretically and right now in actuality) if you don't modify behavior when using it. But that's a terrible way to make a commercial product, you can't expect people to change for you. And so they create these very bland experiences that are the projection of their current apps onto a voice or AI interface.
And they aren't wrong to take this conservative approach... it's very boring but very rational. I think this is a particularly opportune moment for people with their own very personal and specific ideas about how integrate AI into a particular part of their life to try to actually build that experience, with an authentic goal of just improving their own life. An open source stack makes that possible... including the device, because Google and Apple just won't let you use a phone that way.
So this is very exciting! My dev kit is ordered, and I await it eagerly
My understanding is that this is one of them, and they changed the name shortly after the other was released.
Edit: ah seems the title has been updated
This renamed from Friend, and still (as of this comment) refers to itself as Friend in the home page footer links to the two variations of the product, Friend and Friend Dev Kit.
- The device itself is a Nordic Semiconductor BLE chip with GPIO, mic, and BLE.
- Audio is streamed (as OPUS) via BLE to the associated mobile device where some initial processing is handled.
- The audio is then passed to a FastAPI-based backend API service that handles integrations with Deepgram, etc.
Overall I think it's a clever way to handle this: you get to use very cheap hardware that sips power (battery) while utilizing the connectivity of the associated mobile device whether it be WiFi or cellular.
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I personally have wanted something like this for years -- but at the same time im anti surveillance - what would be interesting is "anti-surveillance surveillance"
Imagine placing these in the planter in a conference room... board room, green room. Stick one in the head-liner of an SUV used by political folks.
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(also not sure why "LED" is listed as a feature on the "connectivity" section...
I had posted earlier about a redditor who wanted to make a thing similar to this with whisper and such, for transcribing conversations at a corporate conference...
EDIT: from the FAQ in their discord:
> Q6: Will there be other STT (Speech To Text) Services allowed?
> Yes! We currently use Deepgram while we are developing the app but we plan to update the settings so users can choose a wide range of STT services like OpenAI's Whisper, Deepgram and we want to allow users to use there own hosted server for this.
Fully open source? So the AI models used are all free software with everything available?
> Live Transcription: Capture live voice and audio with human-level accuracy using OpenAI Whisper and Deepgram.
> Efficient Summarization: Get instant insights and summaries powered by ChatGPT in just 5 seconds.
Nope.
E.g. Can I use this device for any language or is it just English. Can it do translations?
When my son was growing up there were times I wish he didn’t have to struggle or guess as much.
(I do think AI/LLMs have a lot of potential for making life easier for autistic people, but ... this isn't it.)
In CA, recording me in a setting where I have the expectation of privacy is illegal, unless you have asked my permission first.
So yes, the law tells that to “millions of people,” if that many people decide to start recording conversations.
That has nothing to do with using an AI assistant that only listens to your voice and doesn’t store the recordings.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
12 states, including california, disagree.
With respect to recording I'll also be thinking about what kinds of uses are responsible. The existence of a recording doesn't mean I have to use it or store it. I honestly can't recall a time when, if I had been continuously recording, I would have used that recording against anyone present. I would expect to be as respectful of the privacy of people I interact with as I am now... I don't recount what people say to me now without considering if that what they said might have been in confidence, without considering how what they said might be interpreted differently by a different audience or out of context, and without passing on my most good faith interpretation of what they said. That's a complicated rule system, but it does actually fire when I recount other people's statements.
But I'll also have to navigate how I use it, understand what things it captures that I don't want it to, and how that affects the people around me.
Also I just want to see what's possible, without pre-censoring what's appropriate before we know how any of this stuff works in practice. I'm willing to take the risk it's all a bad idea and I'll soon think of it as a dead end.
Or alternatively, get with the times and recognize that people will sometimes offload some of their mental processing onto silicon.
I totally understand the desire to have computers help us, but telling people to get over it is a blatant rejection of their desire to privacy.
We don't need to jam these adversarially, we need a wireless protocol that enables polite behavior. Imagine if you were walking around broadcasting "I'm recording" and you run across somebody broadcasting "please don't record". The devices could prompt a conversation between humans.
Changing the dynamic to one that's resolved initially (rather than later, when somebody's upset because they didn't know they were being recorded) would be a significant shift I think.
The majority (39/50) of states only require the consent of a single party to record a conversation. If you want to take issue with other people recording conversations they have with you, that is something you should take up with your state's legislature.
It's never polite to record when you know the other party does not consent, but I'm not sure it should be illegal.
Once that wake word circuit detects that series of syllables, then it activates the rest of the device and starts streaming the buffer and current audio into whatever systems it has for transcription (or cloud).
In many cases, this happens locally. If you have an iPhone, put it airplane mode and say "Siri, what time is it?" And it will respond - all processing is local, no recoding on the cloud for that request. Some other requests may require additional processing. "Hey Siri, where am I?" -> "To do that, you will need to turn off airplane mode."
If you have an Amazon device, enable the "Start of request sound" ( https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21341310011 ). With this in place, you can then hear when the wake word has been triggered.
None of these devices are constantly recording or streaming to the cloud (aside: consider the network and compute requirements if every iPhone or Android was constantly streaming sound to Apple or Google for it to be recorded).
https://www.nxp.com/design/design-center/software/embedded-s...
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-sr/en/latest/esp32s3...
https://www.syntiant.com/news/syntiant-low-power-wake-word-s...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224163648_Fully_int... (from 2010, Fully integrated 500uW speech detection wake-up circuit)
I guess if it a device is transcribing audio data from a buffer it’s not the same as a recording. Still I remember Apple was using some humans to review recordings:
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-10-29...
For many applications with the iPhone, the transcription is done locally.
If you have an iPhone, turn on airplane made and switch on dictation mode.
I need to go to the store and get a two by four
I am five foot ten inches tall
I will also point out that Apple is using an opt-in process rather than opt-out. The article you linked is from October 29th, 2019. iOS 13.2 was released October 28th. It is possible that the release and saying that it is opt in ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/118392 ) "Privacy settings to control whether or not to help improve Siri and Dictation by allowing Apple to store audio of your Siri and Dictation interactions" is what triggered the article (the change prompted the article rather than the article prompting the change).
https://foundation.mozilla.org/es/privacynotincluded/article...
And from the about security settings:
If you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation, the audio of your interactions with Siri and Dictation may be stored on Siri servers and reviewed by Apple employees to develop and improve Siri, Dictation, and natural language processing functionality in Apple products and services. For general text Dictation performed on device (for example, composing messages and notes, but not dictating in a search box), transcripts and audio are not shared with Apple by default, but are shared if you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation. In addition, other Siri Data, such as computer-generated transcriptions of your requests, names of your contacts, apps installed on your devices, and location, is also used to improve Siri.
Edit: where I am we have one-party consent rules for audio recording. I can have my phone in my pocket recording without you knowing just fine. But I can’t tape a microphone to a park bench and record the conversations there that I’m not a part of.
For example, a commonly-held view online is that it should be legal to record interactions with police. By your definition, however, that would be "spying", as the police may not necessarily consent.
It's generally only recording private conversations that's illegal.
It feels like you didn't think about the differences between the two situations at all
I don't particularly like this device mainly due because of the cloud related vulnerabilities - if it used all off-line models, I wouldn't be nearly as opposed to it.
On the other hand, let's not be deliberately disingenuous.
The goal of this device is to record conversations that you're part of, which one would hardly call "spying" in any conventional sense. That's why one-party recordings are legal in many states.
Even in this thread you can see differing opinions on the privacy aspects of this device. When talking about something as important as privacy, I don't think we can afford to just hope everyone agrees with us and... what, ignore the people who don't? That doesn't seem good for society or people living in them.
For example, what if you’re being threatened by a coworker and wish to report it with some kind of evidence?
“Excuse me good sir, might I record your threats so that I can report you?” is probably not going to work.