The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it.

I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.

  - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory
  - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen)
  - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM)

It’s definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum, a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this period).

The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?

Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls.

I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother.

I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful.

Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab.

Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.

I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.

  sudo rm -rfv /

I agree. I also don't really have an ambient assistant problem. My phone is always nearby and Siri picks up wake words well (or I just hold the powerbutton).

My problem is Siri doesn't do any of this stuff well. I'd really love to just get it out of the way so someone can build it better.

They seem quite honest with who they are and how they do what they do.

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?

One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for higher transcription accuracy).

Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored. Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on feedback if this is the correct decision.

I wonder if the answer is that it is stored and processes in a way that a human can’t access or read, like somehow it’s encrypted and unreadable but tokenized and can be processed, I don’t know how but it feels possible.

We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on...

This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture.

> The shared household memory pool creates privacy situations we’re still working through. The current design has everyone in the family shares the same memory corpus. Should a child be able to see a memory their parents created? Our current answer is to deliberately tune the memory extraction to be household-wide with no per-person scoping because a kitchen device hears everyone equally. But “deliberately chose” doesn’t mean “solved.” We’re hoping our in-house STT will allow us to do per-person memory tagging and then we can experiment with scoping memories to certain people or groups of people in the household.

True, we focused on hardware embodied AI assistants (smart speakers, smart glasses, etc) as those are the ones we believe will soon start leaving wake words behind and moving towards an always-on interaction design. The privacy implications of an always-listening smart speaker are magnitudes higher than OpenClaw that you intentionally interact with.

Yes, Apple is an ad company. Their annual ad revenue is in the billions, and climbing every year.