Samsung is warning customers to avoid discussing personal information in front of their smart television set.
The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.
Such TV sets 'listen' to every conversation held in front of them and may share any details they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said.
Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens.
This is why I deleted the FaceBook app from my phone:
Yes, I've always thought that Farcebook was dodgy in that way.
It's just the app - if you use FB via a web browser it works nearly as well in mobile mode (except for the lack of convenience of posting pics).
However, being curious - I just checked Chrome on android and it has claimed permissions to grab the mic without asking (how rude!!) - so I am really not sure if that means a website can run funky javascript to get audio or not???
Must check some other browsers...
Obviously what's needed is to use a Samsung TV instead of the pro microphones they used on Jamaica Inn, etc.
Here is a link to the actual Samsung document so people don't have to drill down to find it.
And why are the BBC citing The Daily Beast, rather than the Samsung document?
I've just read this in the Telegraph. Are they serious ?
"Television companies advise users who are concerned to avoid discussing 'personal' matters in their livings rooms."
I have a Samsung SmartTV UE32EH5300 but can find nothing in the menus about 'Voice recognition.' Does anyone know which models are affected whilst I wait for Samsung, who have no doubt been innudated with queries?
Only some models - more recent one I think - our 2012 plasma doesn't have anything like that.
Should be able find manual etc. on the samsung website if you can't find yours.
I did find, what I think was the correct e-Manual, 800+ pages, and Find didn't come up with Voice recognition so I think you're right.
Quite a few I expect but the sets are likely to have a very weird idea of what is going on in your personal life if the state of the art TV realtime voice to subtitles in football commentary is anything to go by!
Fork handles vs four candles pretty much sums it up.
On 09/02/2015 20:42, Martin Brown wrote: ...
My dentist's waiting room has a TV with that feature for the news channel. The most entertaining bit is trying to work out what the presenter actually said.
I think this is really funny. This has all the makings of a 'company innovation causes loss of sales. I am sure there will be no end of terrible puns in headlines and Samsung will t be the butt of it all.
Its not the first time unforseen things have happened though I had a talking clock from the 80s made by Sharp, and when it got confused it would play bits of recorded speech that apparently were on its chip. Unfortunately it tended to always find the Japanese versions, but occasionally you could hear some oriental woman speaking in English, a few words about how xxxxxx boring this was. It used real voice segments to make up its speech, unlike the very early ones which were totally digital and sounded like it.
It long since died though, with some kind of terminal continuous resetting. Brian
Must say I'm pretty impressed with Google's speech recognition on my mobile. I rarely type anything these days
I am slightly surprised that they didn't include a requirement for any command to start with a specific command word, possibly user programmable. I would have thought that listening for only one word would have simplified the processing.
I'm surprised that the speech to text translation can't be done inside the TVs own electronics. Why does it have to be sent to a third party?
Because it's hard to do it quickly and effectively with the processing power available.
Modern mobiles have very good voice recognition (well Apple and Android does, I've not had the chance to try it on Windows Phone) but they rely on an Internet connection to do the work on the server.
Though I guess in time as they get more powerful and the software gets better it will move to the device.
Chris French put finger to keyboard:
That, and fine-tuning the recognition is more achievable when you've got hundreds of thousands of samples.
Is four candles the average illumination level on the set of Wolf Hall?
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