Nothingburger. For the vast majority of users the audio was already getting sent to the cloud for realtime processing. Nothing here changes that.
For a few devices, some amount of processing was getting done on-device. Now, with the fancy LLMs, it has to revert to sending it all to the cloud.
Just turn on the feature to delete the recording after each processing. Best you can get if you want to keep using these devices and not run an NVidia processing cluster in your kitchen.
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So… if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That’s how little it needs to work on-site.
Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you’ve installed. It does a match against the phrase ‘slots’ and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.
With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it’s all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don’t be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.
If you don’t like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you’ll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it’s shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There’s no free lunch.
This shows how one company (li-cycle) that claims they recycle 95% of the lithium does it: https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ
99.99% doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Not a formal audit, but a more recent review of the protocol: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/
They can take Fort Ross, but they can’t pry Clam Beach from our cold, dead hands.
My wife and I used to tag-team. Only one person got to lose it at a time. As soon as one person got that distant, exasperated look, Parent 2 jumped in and Parent 1 could go cool down, watch a show, have a drink, or take a bath. If solo, we’d use distraction and humor. If too much, you stick them in a playpen with toys and let them self-sooth.
If it’s any consolation, they won’t remember diddly-squat of anything that happened before ages 5-6.
My kid was told to fill one out, even though we knew we didn’t qualify. After a LOT of paperwork, it came back with an offer of a $2K loan.
That last one was just people shooting at magic suits.
My first tech job out of college, I was told to go talk to “Dave,” the guru old-timey programmer and learn the lay of the land. He turned out to be this crotchety old guy, with low tolerance for idiots, but a soft spot for someone who actually paid attention.
A few months in, I was told to go fix a feature in the company’s main product which was sold to power utilities. This was a MASSIVE code base, with a mix of C, C++, assembler, and a bit of Fortran thrown in. I spent a week poring through all the code trying to figure things out. Then I hit a mystery workflow that didn’t make sense.
I walk over to Dave’s office and ask a specific question. Now, mind you, he had worked on this years ago, and had long moved on to new products. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, then without looking at the screen once tells me to go look at such and such file for such and such variable, and a list of functions that were related. I go back to my desk and damn if it wasn’t EXACTLY as he described.
Now, I’m probably as old as he was then. I don’t remember what I wrote an hour ago. No matter what I build, I’ll always be in awe of Dave and what he could keep in his head.
Getting less programmer_humor and more “I didn’t get the promo” angry vibe from this.
I use the same tool. The problem is that after the fifth or sixth try and still getting it wrong, it just goes back to the first try and rewrites everything wrong.
Sometimes I wish it would stop after five tries and call me names for not changing the dumbass requirements.
Most IoT devices that died did so because the vendor went out of business and had to shut off the servers. Most lived in hope that a last minute investment would keep them afloat. In a few other cases, it was the middleware software provider (like Google IoT) that shut down and bricked a device.
This legislation might apply to a big company that decides to discontinue a product line and could then send notices out, but most startups won’t know (or admit defeat) till the last possible moment. By then it’s too late.
I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.
The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.
None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.
So many ways…
Don’t mind the overhead camera pointed at your desk.