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Comment by qwertox

4 years ago

Last week my Pixel started to display an overlay with closed captions of the audio flowing through the device.

It listens in on any audio and transcribes it. Probably handy for podcasts, but other things are just scary.

Maybe it's OK if Google does it, I don't really know. I dislike it, it concerns me. The device would have a transcription of audio conversations I have through apps like WhatsApp. Or it could do something useful like transcribe podcasts and hand the transcription over to the owners, so that they can publish it along with their podcasts, without Google needing to dedicate their servers to it.

But if companies like Xiaomi get this feature for free on Android 15 or 16, I know what they will use this tech for. I know what Facebook would use this tech for, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally start to sell a cheap but powerful Android device.

With offline transcription the "your device is recording me" will get so much harder to detect, as no audio will get streamed. It will become so easy to listen for keywords like "lawnmower" and count their occurrences or their proximity to phrases like "need to buy", or "is pregnant" and stuff like that.

I don't want my devices to do this.

6 comments

qwertox

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tytso  4 years ago

When you enabled the Live Caption (similarly to how folks told you to disable it --- on my phone it was turned off by default) the following informational screen should have been displayed:

"Live Caption detects speech on your device and automatically generates captions.

When speech is captioned, this feature uses additional battery. All audio and captions are processed locally and never leave the device. Currently available in English only."

So note that Google does not get a copy of the audio stream. It stays local to your device only. I don't know about you, but seems like a really handy feature to me, especially for those who might have hearing difficulties.

esrauch  4 years ago

The live transcription behavior is enabled by a button at the bottom of the volume control toggle. If it transcribes even if that button is off that seems a lot more concerning.

I don't think transcribing on device and then uploading would make any sense: for something like podcasts they could just do serverside transcription (they already do for youtube videos at least).