My friends and I have talked about privacy concerns about home-assistants like Amazon Echo, Alexa, Google Home, and others. We have discussed abandoning them, the legitimacy of the included mute button, and what the spying employees must think of us. In my case, they probably judge me on how much I talk with my cat. During these discussions, we occasionally triggered the devices in question, so we started referring to these voice-activated-home-assistants as house robots, which are not to be confused with robotic vacuum cleaners.
One solution I had was to dilute the information stream by blasting my Echo with speech when I wasn't around. I wanted a random word and speech generator so that Amazon would overhear a bunch of stuff, but it wouldn't be anything that would help them in marketing. In the end, when I logged into Amazon with a web browser, their suggestions would lose their custom-tailored glamour. Instead of marketing to me based on countless hours of observation, it would be tainted wildly by dribble and easy to ignore.
I planned to create a pseudo-random word generator, and then offer it as a YouTube stream so others could befuddle their house robot without any downloads or soldering.
Enough background
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I started with a list of 6,800 common nouns, which seemed like the most likely hooks for spying marketer algorithms. Google spreadsheets seemed like a fitting home, and I had experience with their RAND() function. As I looked, it seemed like Google also had an Accessibility option to read the spreadsheet out loud. It seemed like a one-stop-shop, so I looked for instructions to turn on the text-to-speech function. Nothing worked. Forums teemed with people who reported the same dead end.
A few folks said that a Chrome plugin called "Read Aloud" worked for them, so I installed it. It would have been fine if I played with it longer, but I shied away because it immediately started to read the whole screen, and I wanted something to read a single spreadsheet cell.
My next try was another plugin Chrome called "Selection Reader (Text to Speech)," which worked well to read a single spreadsheet cell, so long as I highlighted the word first. It turned out that "Read Aloud" would also read selections, but it displayed a dialogue box during the reading, and I didn't like that.
The next step was to select a noun pseudo-randomly. I used an equation borrowed from Arduino's map() function to glue an arbitrarily long list into Google Sheet's RAND() function. This way, a number between 0 and 1, would translate to an integer between 1 and 6800. The INDIRECT() function in Sheets let me use that pseudo-random number to display the chosen noun in the same cell. To select that word, instead of the equation, I had to copy and paste the value into a new place. Pasting also triggered the RAND() function and gave me a new word.
So far, everything was a manual process, but it was repeatable, and I had all the pieces on the board. I used AutoHotkey to copy the prandomized cell, paste the string value to a new one, select it, and press the speak button. I tuned the sequence to one second per word and recorded a screen capture of ten words.
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2020-05-18
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