People call me paranoid for saying this, but I’m not. I just understand (or at least pretend I understand) what’s going on inside our connected devices.

Speech Recognition in the Cloud

What we have here is the dream of speech recognition come true in the cloud. And now that we have it people are (and should be?) terrified.

The Clash of Dreams and Reality

In our dreams we want to be able to talk to our devices and have them do our bidding. In Star Trek they had the Universal Translator. You can now get much the same feature by downloading the Google Translate app on your smartphone. Try it. It’s absolutely mind blowing. But for this technology to work we can’t just rely on our phones or computers or TVs. Language is complex and can’t be simplified to algorithms that can run on our local devices. For this technology to work we need the Cloud. And that means literally recording and sending your conversations over the web to a server that then parses the data, gleans the meaning of it, and acts according to your instructions.

The Question Isn’t If You are Being Recorded, But Who Listens

Most people will find this revelation rather unsettling, but the reality is this is not new. It’s been going on for years. And it’s a direct response to what we as consumers have been asking for.

Somewhere George Orwell is shaking his head in shame while dictating his next novel through his phone.