[majewsky]

Strong encryption is a thing.

EDIT: Another thing that just came to my mind. Even when you analyze network traffic and observe that traffic only occurs during your queries (i.e. in the seconds after the hotword is uttered), that doesn't mean that the Echo won't use the opportunity to send some previously-recorded audio to the server together with the current recording. In the same way that clever hackers disguise themselves by having their network traffic mimic the shape and direction of legitimate network traffic.

[johnjac]

Yes but we could could look at the amount of of data transmitted in total. Audio compression is well understood, and can infer within an range of usable quality, if any excess voice or other data is sent over the network.

[pixl97]

So what you're saying is, if a company like Amazon or Google has the excess bandwidth, it is beneficial for them to send way too much data in the first place in order to disguise what data is actually being sent.

Now, there is some security basis

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fabian/papers/tissec2010.pdf

>Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations

[krisroadruck]

Assuming its sending it as audio, and not as transcribed text which is both smaller and also much more compressible.

[Analog24]

ASR is a hugely complex process that is handled by ML algorithms on Amazon's servers. The echo simply does not have the hardware to handle this on it's own.

[krisroadruck]

Is it though? Not trying to be argumentative but I remember using dragon naturally speaking to do voice dictation way back in like 98 on a processor that makes today's average smartphone look like a supercomputer. I thought all the ML stuff was for figuring out context and the like, but straight transcription?

[nerpderp83]

Modern voice codecs are extremely compact. An annotated text representation of voice will take up equivalent space.

[UncleMeat]

You own the client. You can break any crypto it is doing.