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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

I saw an YouTuber the other day sharing their "day in the life" as an Amazon Software Engineer while promoting (as part of a paid sponsorship) the AI note taking feature of SoundCore headphones, claiming they now record their meetings and receive an AI summary at the end.

I wonder how many companies realise these devices that appear as "headsets" are now funnelling their meetings into these new AI companies who are more worried about the World Cup then replying to security researchers.

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I remember while at Amazon, during the "everyone needs to be using AI in every way" push, one of my teammates was proud to present that he had figured out how to split the audio on his mac to record the meeting (because our meeting software didn't allow for recordings without consent) and fed this into speech-to-text and generated summaries of the meetings without any of us knowing (i.e. no consent).

I let him and our manager know that he'd just violated eavesdropping laws across state lines (he's in D.C. and I'm in WA; RCW 9.73.030).

It's amazing how many people don't think that "AI Notetaker" is the same as "I secretly recorded this (as possibly violated the law)"

DC is a one party consent "state", so I don't think Washington state's law would apply to him

I'm very torn on these laws. On one hand I understand the purpose, but on the other recoding phone calls and meetings is immensely useful. On Android I had an option to automatically record phone calls and it has saved my ass many times, while on IOS it's not possible at all.

In many places it's perfectly legal to record interactions you are a part of without informing anyone about it. Publishing them is usually another matter.

Btw, how do you understand the purpose of this law? Because I can't imagine it serving anyone other than abusers and liars that want to abuse a lie without leaving evidence.

Two party consent states are important IMO because if one person records, one person controls the facts. They could release a snippet of the call. But if you get an audible notification that the call is being recorded, you might record it too and have the full context. Just my 2c

If the recording is cut, nobody in their right mind is going to believe that only this was said. You don't control anything by releasing partial recording. You even reveal a lot about yourself because of what part you decided to keep/show. But what was said, was said, regardless of how small part of the whole it was. And you can't simply claim that you did not say it.

Two party consent just means recordings are mostly useless because it lets the worst party control the availability, so unless they are very stupid, they just won't consent.

Interestingly, Zoom and presumably others are logging and reporting on device SIDs and names, so those AI headsets are in server-side data associated with specific workers. I imagine Zoom would rather not advertise this data collection openly — and I don’t have personal proof that the data is transmitted to their servers, so perhaps it’s just collected at the client and then not harvested, unlikely as that may be. But that worker may find themselves targeted for termination if their employer’s platform discovers their unauthorized use of non-employer AI to process employer private work output by their Bluetooth device name.

Not trying to be rude or mean here but it should be, "a YouTuber" since YouTuber starts with a consonant sound.

You are correct but it is not based on the sound, just if it starts with a vowel. If one listens to people speak, a common mistake, even I do it from copying the same in others, (depending on what crowd I've been around a lot,) is using an before hour as in 'an hour' though most times people will correctly write 'a hour'.

Who writes "a hour"?

Merriam-Webster seems to specifically disagree with you on both points: the usage of "a" vs "an" is based on the sound of the following word, and "hour" is preceded by "an" since it sounds like a vowel despite starting with a consonant.

> You should use a when the word that follows sounds like it begins with a consonant (‘a dog,’ ‘a balloon’). You should use an if the word that follows sounds like it begins with a vowel (‘an ant,’ ‘an elevator’). Remember that sometimes a word will begin with a vowel but it sounds like a consonant (‘a one-time deal’); in this case you should still use a, rather than an. And in some cases a word will start with a consonant but it sounds like a vowel (’an hour’); in this case you should still use an, rather than a. [1]

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-a-or-an

Of course there is the other can of worms of debating whether Y is a vowel or not. Also, “YouTube” sounds like it starts with “u” sound, despite starting with “y”.

Maybe English is just broken. Words starting with a long “u” sound make me question the rule - different than other long vowels…

Does one play “a ukulele” or “an ukulele”?

We need an umpire to make the call (;->

There isn’t really any debate about “Y” - it acts as a vowel in most cases, and as a consonant in some cases, particularly at the beginning of a word, as in “Youtube”. The “you” sound is a consonant sound, and that also answers the ukulele question: it’s “a ukelele”, because it’s the sound that matters here.

Using a more familiar example might help illustrate this: we say “a user”, not “a user”; similarly, it’s “a European”, not “an European”.

Here’s a good article about it: https://phonicshero.com/when-is-a-consonant-a-vowel-and-why/

That's interesting only for the fact I recall it being taught different or perhaps missed that all through school. Being based on sound brings yet another aspect of english into the nightmarish realm. My mind races to the many words around my locale and various circles of people I worked around where the lead vowel is silent / near silent ... words like articulate and yet aware that some do go to the effort to pronounce with a high emphasis on the lead vowel like they are were educated / lived elsewhere.

he recorded his comment with an AI service :shrug:

Well, on the plus side, SoundCore (Anker) are at least reputable enough (even though security teams would still want to review that!):

Under the security part, they do seem to at least be compliant with your typical security standards (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1, etc.) and claim that all data is deleted within 12 hours of transcription. So it isn't like the contents of your meeting are being siphoned off to some fly-by-night service, at least.

https://www.soundcore.com/soundcore-work-ai-voice-recorder

The one thing I know Anker for is that they were uploading the feeds of their doorbell cameras without encryption (even though they claimed e2ee), and iirc they were also uploading thumbnails of these cameras to a publicly accessible S3 bucket, and consistently lying about it all.

So no, I don't think they're very reputable at all.

I moreso meant the quality of their hardware, though that's fair, I didn't recall that. Still, if they are bothering to go to the effort of getting audited (granted, I don't like reading audit reports so I didn't look at who actually performed them) - it seems like they are actually trying, as opposed to what you might expect from a less scrupulous company, where it's more like the wild west.

I don't really understand why these "AI notetaking" services/features still exist outside video conference software today -- any company that needs it would have already purchased the license from Zoom/Teams/Slack which takes care of everything including storage and compliance.

Ai notetaking is such as signal for stupidity but I'm not surprised that it is getting so much traction. It is basically like getting all your lecture notes from the A student so you can fuck around instead of paying actual attention to anything, and hoping the A students understanding of the lecture somehow rubs off on you.

Kind of funny how that is the pitch for a lot of these products. AI to help you take notes in meetings. AI to help you pass an interview. AI to read and write for you. AI to let you be a lazy bastard, in other words.

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