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by wccrawford 3465 days ago
If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.
2 comments

I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business.

Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same:

> Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony

https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...

I would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).