[gr4yb34rd]

I doubt the guts of something like an Echo would be capable of containing any kind of speech to text model. It'll probably be a lot more of a concern in a few years when speech models like that are getting baked into cheap chips for consumer devices, though.

[woodruffw]

I'm not as doubtful: iPhones have had on-device speech recognition since at least 2019, with iOS 13[1]. Amazon might have legal or policy reasons for not doing offline speech recognition, but the technology has been there for a while.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...

[sokoloff]

Has the tech been available in a $29 device that also includes a speaker and a microphone array?

[dehrmann]

Early versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking ran on Pentiums.

[phire]

Dragon Naturally Speaking required extensive training on the voice of the user, and the result wasn't as accurate as modern machine-learning speech-to-text models. You had to watch it and actively correct it's results.

IMO, the accuracy of modern speech-to-text models is still nowhere near accurate enough. Maybe they should bring back the per-user training

[chickenchicken]

I remember seeing this on a trade fair as a child with my mother in 1993

[vineyardmike]

Not gen 1 devices but in 2023 some of the echos do partial on-device processing of commands (same with HomePods and same with Google home).