Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Amazon Announces the Seven Microphone ECHO



"The Echo may be the closest thing we’ll have to a Star Trek computer at home." 
– CNET 

"Echo could hear my voice even when music was playing loudly…" 
– USA Today 

"With Amazon Echo, it was love at first sight." 
– Re/code

What is  Amazon Echo?

Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It's hands-free and always on. With seven microphones and beam-forming technology, Echo can hear you from across the room—even while music is playing. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound.

Echo connects to Alexa, a cloud-based voice service, to provide information, answer questions, play music, read the news, check sports scores or the weather, and more—instantly. All you have to do is ask. Echo begins working as soon as it detects the wake word. You can pick Alexa or Amazon as your wake word.

More details here.

4 comments:

  1. I dunno, man. First they monitor what page I'm reading on my Kindle, now they're ***listening*** to my home (boat). You do know that Amazon hosts lots of spook activities for the Feds, yes?
    Cool tech, though.

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  2. Sometimes I wonder if these tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Apple, etc…) are in competition to see who can acquire the most data on members of society in order to use these data against us all eventually. I remember during the financial crisis when Verizon received bailout money to the tune of 1.5 billion. At the time it seemed rather strange that the feds would be throwing money around until it became evident that cell phone data were being collected illegally, and much of these data were undoubtedly collected from Verizon.

    I’m not convinced that Amazon one day won’t turn over data to the feds that Echo has collected from unsuspecting users. What if Echo picks up a conversation regarding tax fraud? Does Amazon have an obligation to report this to the feds as potential “terrorist” activity? “Yes” will be the answer.

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  3. The goal of an AI system is the acquisition of information and the conversion to knowledge. We are eyewitnesses to the coming of the singularity. AI systems will compete by being faster in acquiring more information faster and more accurately producing pattern recognition. We will have no secrets in the future. It is a survival of the fastest and smartest systems. The coin of this new world is data and the capital is knowledge.

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