Voice Recognition for Log?

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

Dockhead-
First, bear in mind that everywhere, not just in the US but perhaps especially here, politicians have cash stuffed under their mattresses. It is very convenient for untraceable payoffs, case in point our poor Mr. Trump's check to Mr. Cohen was it? that was just reprinted in the Nooze.
So at least here, no politician is going to "ban" cash. It is too dear to them. And of course, our vast mob economy, off-the-books employers, drugs, all of that depends on cash. That's a tremendous apple cart to upset.

"However, this is also a moving target."
At a tortoise's pace.
" You talk about cash, but cash will probably disappear in a few years."
Nah. 35?ish years ago, my friend (a doctor still in private practice) used to always pay in cash when we ate out. Cash income, cash expense, no one to track him or it.
And when the nice folks from the IRS decided to check my taxes (if you're self-employed, as I was at the time, you can expect that to happen once every 25 years or so) the agent couldn't believe me when I said I don't use cash. Maybe $20 a month for the barber (another industry that prefers cash and has peculiar "employment" options) and another $30 at the greengrocer, yet another group that took no credit cards, he still couldn't believe it. I told him "here's the bank, have a good time" because, yes, I was that sure there was nothing to find.
So I'm familiar with the cashless economy. No matter how I was employed, it was easier to carry plastic and not have to make cash withdrawls, not have to worry about losing cash or being mugged...just easier to use plastic.
Now, if I'd had cash income that was worth hiding (as opposed to declaring it and being able to take expenses and make retirement contributions and show a higher income for credit rating, etc.) I might very well have done like my friend the doctor, and pushed cash.
Today the numbers are that something like 74% of all US customers on the street are using credit cards exclusively--if you only take cash or checks, you lose 74% of the potential customers right off the top. Yes, I'm aware of that.

Still, if you have a housecleaner? If you want to tip the car mechanic or the mailman? Yeah, people find and use cash, still.

If you want to rent a car or reserve a hotel room, both want credit cards--or a very generous cash deposit "just in case". That's been the same for at least 30-40 years, too.

"It's already illegal to use cash for transactions above €1000 in France, and Sweden is now debating a complete ban on cash and ceasing issuing any cash money at all."
Didn't know about France but Sweden has made the business news here in the US over that. There are US stores that also say "No cash" and that's made the nooze and gotten some legal attention. The problem here being, since cash is legal tender for all debts, once I have offered you legal tender in payment for my purchase, if you refuse to take it, well then...I tried to pay. You refused my payment. OK, have a nice day?
And there's perhaps precedent to support that. On the New Jersey Turnpike they used to have boxes of envelopes at the toll booths. If the booth was unmanned and you had no change (honor system) you could just take an envelope,prepaid I think, and mail in your dime!

We are behind on contactless cards and mobile payment in the US, and I suspect that's by intent from the credit card processing groups. I've had so many offers for smartphone and contactless and software of the month that comes and goes...I don't want to know. If it won't work "everywhere"...then I'll just keep using plastic.

Although now, with so much datamining and tracking, I have to admit cash is looking very much more attractive again.

"Paper tickets disappeared for airlines in Europe a couple of years ago."
I think a paper ticket cost an extra $25 as long as a decade ago here. Haven't used one in at least that long, for that reason alone.
I still print out the electronic boarding pass, because the last thing I need is to find some phone glitch preventing me from showing it.

I don't know what the commercial/professional logs are doing, but I would expect that software targeted for the small craft mass market is going to be more slapdash. And it isn't just there. Maybe 15 years ago, our fairly old school DMV decided that while we were changing an owner and correcting an error (diesel, not petrol) on the boat registration, that the long-standing registration HAD TO BE WRONG because it didn't have enough numbers in the HIN. Uh, no, that's the HIN, that's the same one that's on the boat, that's what it always has been...but for this office, this clerk, this supervisor, it wasn't long enough. They said "go take a picture or make a tracing and bring it back".
On our way out I said to my friend "Picture, huh? They never heard of PhotoShop?" And let's just say, the problem was solved. Incidentally, digital photos can be "unwatermarked" and tampered with in other common ways now, as well. Digital documents? After all these years, MOST Windows NT users (who no longer are even aware they are using NT) still don't know it is a journaling file system, and there are streams attached to file that leave all kinds of fingerprints. But, if you've known about those...there are simple tools to change them, and "authenticate" as you please--unless you have to worry about a long chain of trust in multiple hands.
If you keep up with the IT trade papers, or the regular CERT publications on computer security, you'll have far less faith in security. Right now, most of the security industry (and the 3-letter federal agencies) are worried that the entire US power grid (among others) is going to go down, down hard, because hacking is so good and security is so bad. They're fairly certain that Russia already took down a major part of the Ukranian(?) grid a while back. All it takes are some dedicated people, the security is always getting bypassed in clever new ways.
In medieval times, kings learned to build impregnable castles. Other kings learned how to undermine castle walls. Oops.
Paper ain't dead yet. And, like the slide rule in my nav kit, it never runs out of batteries.(G)

I think you're slipping back into mixing up "security" of documents, electronic or paper, with their value as evidence of something. Again -- there is no such thing as a "secure" paper document in the U.S. other than a recorded deed or mortgage. In Continental Europe, you can record any kind of contract with a notary. But this has nothing to do with whether or not your simple written document or simple electronic document or record has valuable as evidence. Your simple written log has no "security" whatsoever -- its existence is just a piece of evidence, that it was truthfully written down by you, and at the time -- subject to challenge in case someone doubts you, whereupon you go through the usual process. A totally insecure ordinary electronic document is exactly the same, and has about the same weight. An electronic photo, notwithstanding Photoshop, has very significant evidentiary value.


I'll echo the comment of McBlaze above about American peculiarities. Tipping?? I can't remember the last time I tipped, and who tips mailmen? My great-grandfather maybe, who was born in the 19th century -- I doubt even that my grandfather ever did this.



Cash is much further on the way to disappearing, than you realize. Next year I will open a project where I expect a couple of million people per year. In one of the Nordic countries. It will be totally cashless -- legal here, and now the norm for such operations, as handling cash is expensive and inefficient for businesses dealing with the public. No cash, no tips. Most taxis here don't accept cash -- no cash, no tips. At McDonald's here you order at an electronic kiosk and pay with a contactless card. You can no longer ride public transportation here using cash -- you must have a smartphone app (or for really ancient dinosaurs, a pass card, but you struggle here without a smartphone -- not using a smartphone is like being illiterate was 50 years ago).



I think most people up here, do not carry any cash at all any more. I sure don't. I expect to live to see cash abolished everywhere, I hope I live that long, anyway.

[hellosailor]

Mac-
Not all mailmen and not all customers, but in some places they go beyond the norm, bringing up things instead of cramming them in the box, etc. so it really is "for exceptional service".
There's an old joke about some newlyweds who've just moved into the suburbs. December comes around and they are talking about who to tip and how much, the gardener, the heating oil delivery man, the postman...And the man comes home one day to see the postman leaving, with a big grin, and his wife wearing her lingerie. He asks here, what was that all about? And she says, "Well, you said to give the postman a buck and *** him, so I did."

Now, what do you do when the "waiter" or the hair stylist (barber) also happens to be the OWNER of the place?? Yeah, gratuities get complicated.

And I just love when online delivery options include tips *starting* at 20% and only going up...Or, there's Instacart, a delivery service that picks up groceries & restaurant food and home delivers them. They can't tell you if the price online is the same as the store price, because the *store* sets the online prices. And they "suggest" a 10% tip, but it turns out the tip is not for the worker--it is a gofundme style payment TO THE COMPANY to subsidize their rates. WTF?!

All I know is, if there's a hand in my pocket, and it ain't mine, it certainly isn't my tailor trying to smooth out the trouser lines.

[hellosailor]

Dockhead-
Good luck with your million customers. But that's there, and not here, where there have been suits over bus and train tickets and tokens and whether a "fare" has a cash value or is rather, good for one ride, regardless of changing values. And some of the villagers are getting pitchforks out because electronic highway tolling is now requiring multiple passes and accounts--and refusing cash completely in some places. The suits have barely started on that one. Scandinavia and the EU and the US may each come to different conclusions about that one, just as they have with medical systems and schooling.
"Your simple written log has no "security" whatsoever -- its existence is just a piece of evidence, that it was truthfully written down by you, and at the time -- subject to challenge in case someone doubts you, whereupon you go through the usual process."
The thing about a proper BOUND log book, and sometimes a BOUND book is required, is that anyone who is looking at it can tell if there are pages missing, or if gaps have been left open, or other simple visible signs of consistency and alteration. With electronics? WYSIWYG, and you have generally no idea, no easy way, to even look for tampering outside of the forensics process.
With a proper log book, with no gaps and bound pages, I can at least see, easily, if a section has been erased or tampered with. Something on your phone? Unless I can verify it with an outside authority, like web server certificates, I have no idea whose kids drew it up.
You may remember the "annual" news some years ago, that this or that American Red Cross chapter was having problems with embezzlers, pedophiles, felons...until it got to a point (around 2006?) where the ARC said that all volunteers would have to go through a credentialling process. Except, they cut a sweetheart deal with some company in California to do background checks for $2 a piece, instead of the market rate of $20. This made it affordable for the ARC to pay for the checks.
I went to their web site to start the process, and got a security warning. Called around some IT buddies who all said the same thing--there's a problem with that site. Called the verification company, they said no, that's an MSIE bug, do this this and this and the warning will go away. Ergh, well...I called the certificate authority and said "WTF?" and they finally said they couldn't say why, but yes, the security certificate for the verification company had been REVOKED. Couldn't say why but sometimes, it just meant someone had lost a password and was being reset in a few days.
But it took HOURS to get that far. And after a week, then two, with the security certificate still showing as REVOKED, I gave up and quit. Notified the ARC liaison that they had a security problem--their verification company had "privacy" terms that allowed unlimited datamining, and they were telling customers to disable security in order to make their revocation disappear.
I've no idea what their process is now, I understand that this and other issues caused them to literally lose 1/2 of the volunteer workforce (i.e. all workers) that year.
But if there hadn't been an easily accessible central authority to contact--I'd have had no way to tell there was a rat in the cheese. Everyone's self-serving electronics would have been meaningless, and I sure wasn't going to start a forensic examination, was I?

Same thing today. Paper at least CAN show tampering quickly and easily. A screen shot? ROFLMAO! So easy to tamper with electronic boarding passes, even when they are using private 3d bar codes to "verify" them internally.

I guess we can agree to disagree.

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

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Other than perhaps in the third world, and perhaps when dealing with some old people who haven't really adapted to the modern world, I really don't think you will find anyone who has any problem with a well-kept electronic log, ESPECIALLY not one which has an automatically created element like what you get with Konni Log. Ships after all have VDR's, which are electronic. You can fake a VDR log but it would be hellishly difficult, >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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This website forum is a perfect example. It limits editing to 30 minutes and keeps a date stamp.

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

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I'll echo the comment of McBlaze above about American peculiarities. Tipping?? I can't remember the last time I tipped, and who tips mailmen? My great-grandfather maybe, who was born in the 19th century -- I doubt even that my grandfather ever did this.

Cash is much further on the way to disappearing, than you realize. >>>>>>>>>>>>
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as handling cash is expensive and inefficient for businesses dealing with the public. No cash, no tips. Most taxis here don't accept cash -- no cash, no tips. At McDonald's here you order at an electronic kiosk and pay with a contactless card. You can no longer ride public transportation here using cash -- you must have a smartphone app (or for really ancient dinosaurs, a pass card, but you struggle here without a smartphone -- not using a smartphone is like being illiterate was 50 years ago).

I think most people up here, do not carry any cash at all any more. I sure don't. I expect to live to see cash abolished everywhere, I hope I live that long, anyway.

I understand. I've been to a McDonald's with one of those kiosk things and it took me a few minutes to figure it out, longer than if I had gone to a person.


As with all things, there are exceptions, and not all are neanderthals. We have a land line. I had a smartphone back when I lived in California. Other than some limited work use, and to call my wife to tell her I was successfully anchored, I didn't use it much. Once I moved here, I found that wherever I went to anchor had NO phone service, so I relied on marinas with wifi to contact family and stayed blissfully disconnected when anchored out. I still have the smartphone, but use it for my music bluetooth on the boat and limited wifi access for downloading podcasts, and the camera - not great but good enough for personal photos. NO phone.


Cash? I do need it, because when I use a provincial or local park with my boat, they want cash in an envelope every night I stay over. Some are $22, some $28. They don't take anything else. Period. But cash handling is a burden in business.


Getting cash we use our debit card from one account, and use a credit card for everything else, whereas most Canadians use debit cards exclusively, plus cash. Pretty money compared to dull greenbacks in the US!


As for getting cash myself, if I'm good I get my allowance and can go boating to my local provincial park float!


I think there's a great deal of merit in examining not only individual examples like mine, but societal differences and preferences.


My earlier logbooks (six of them) were Rousmaniere's spiral bound but numbered pages. The current one is Dale Nouse's hard bound book, no page numbers but easy to see if a page has been removed.


I agree with the difference between security and evidence, a very BIG difference.


And we used to tip our mailman in California at Xmas. Not here, we have post boxes now, don't even know the mailperson.

[hellosailor]

Stu-
"I agree with the difference between security and evidence, a very BIG difference"
If I could figure out why this forum only allows me to post in plain ASCII (yes, I've tried all the options in multiple browsers) I could probably time-stamp my post deceptively.

Or if I was the least bit clever...since the forum has ignored the security flaws intrinsic to http and refused to upgrade to https for over a year now, pretty much any grade school kid could steal the password of any of the admins, and go in that way. Ooopsie.

And that's ignoring the flaws that are in these "ancient" versions of vBulletin software.

What's that about the illusion of security?(G)

Not to mention another forum that got hacked, what three years ago? And told everyone to log in and change their passwords immediately?

[leftbrainstuff]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

If you don't want to spend a hundred bucks on Nuance (Dragon Dictate) or have an OS and computer with enough hp to natively do voice response (I know Win7 and up have it, not quite up to StarFleet standards) there must be cheaper ways.

But it still requires lots of CPU, and the ability to speak "Tom Brokaw the air traffic controller with no accent" language.

I notice that when I say the word "the" VR systems have no trouble with it. I pronounce it "thee". Nope, humans mishear it as "vee" all the time. If I say "thuh" as is "duh" then they figure out it is "the". Go figure.

On top of that, there's still the problem that although digital signatures have been legally accepted by federal law since the Carter days (something to finally think Jimmy for?) no one really knows it. Banks, brokers, you give 'em a digitally signed email or digital form, PDF, they say "No, you have to sign it and fax or mail it to me."

The only industry that has any concept of digital signatures is real estate. Apparently "But I need those papers, signed, NOW" is enough to motivate them to understand these things. Or at least, recognize them. For the average poor slob, simply GETTING a digital signature or certificate, and then figuring out how to use it, takes a lot of time or money or both. And then, no one still knows how to use it.

You try telling the Royal Navy or the USCG or your insurer "No, really, those members mean it is real and unaltered." Eh, like teaching a pig to play the piano, as Mr. Twain said.

Easy enough to do a voice log, just choose the transcription software of your choice. Authentication? Ah, that will be an expensive computer forensics challenge, when or if the log ever needs to be admitted into evidence. No matter HOW you do it, because you'll be breaking new ground on that.

These days all the needed tech exists and mostly as open source. But I suspect the business case, or commercial viability, of digital logs is currently lacking.

I've been running a digital log for more than 5 years now. In fact we provide a copy to our insurer. I've also used tradational and digital logs as court evidence. The issue is really only whether evidence is trusted or not.

Blockchain (hashed merkle trees and immutable ledgers) are now being used across many heavily regulated industries to create and manage chains of trust. From financial services in Australia (digital mining supply chain management) to tracking property ownership and disputes in New Guinea.

The evidence in terms of data breaches and big data analytics has well proven that traditional methods of record keeping are flawed and too easily 'adjusted' using modern technologies. Docusign is also now very common in document signing.

The current focus of digital trust technologies is focussed on fixing broken and highly visible industry sectors. Anywhere that fraud is an issue is a focus are for these digital trust technologies.

As for voice recognition that is well supported at the edge on low powered devices like Raspberry Pis. The training of the models is done, mostly in cloud environments using gpu based hardware. Inference is then done at the edge where resource requirements are magnitudes less than training of machine learning models.You can even incorporate custom corpuses for specific terminology. These really improve the quality.

I've thought about a voice activated log but my current focus is on hazard to navigation detection. Building a voice activated log is a trivial undertaking on Amazon Web Services these days if you're connected to the internet. Offline is still possible but a little more work deplying your own ML model to cheap commodity edge devices.

Here's just one approach https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ama...xt-interfaces/

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

Stu-
"I agree with the difference between security and evidence, a very BIG difference"
If I could figure out why this forum only allows me to post in plain ASCII (yes, I've tried all the options in multiple browsers) I could probably time-stamp my post deceptively.

Or if I was the least bit clever...since the forum has ignored the security flaws intrinsic to http and refused to upgrade to https for over a year now, pretty much any grade school kid could steal the password of any of the admins, and go in that way. Ooopsie.

And that's ignoring the flaws that are in these "ancient" versions of vBulletin software.

What's that about the illusion of security?(G)

Not to mention another forum that got hacked, what three years ago? And told everyone to log in and change their passwords immediately?

You're again confusing security with evidence.


A forum post is an excellent example for this whole discussion.


Can't be altered without a trace even by the forum owner -- ever heard of Wayback Machine and other web archives?


Yes, your password could be compromised or hacked, but the forum records IP addresses from which posts are made. It is somewhat possible to spoof an IP address, but how likely is it that the evil hacker will know which address to spoof?


Your own computer will retain traces of your activity in making that post.


So altogether, a forum post is a much easier document to authenticate, and much harder to fake, than any piece of paper.



Electronic documents, once they have been emailed or posted, are almost impossible to fake. The same is not true of paper documents, although you could use the same technique that I do with my electronic log -- you could mail every day's log entry to a third person who could witness having received them. That would be incredibly cumbersome, however, whereas with email it is dead simple and almost effortless.


A really superb way to maintain an imperviously authenticable log would be to set up a secure email box where you don't have the password -- you give the password to a third party, say an attorney, not yours. Email your daily log there. In case of any dispute, you will have iron-clad proof that your log is authentic.


Even better would be blockchain, as mentioned by LeftBrain. That would actually be almost trivial to implement, but unlike emailing the log, would require some programming. Blockchain is so powerfully authenticated, so mathematically impossible to fake, that it is even used as money. Perhaps the OpenCPN guys could be interested. I agree with him that there is unlikely to be any commercial value in it.

[skipperearly]

Great discussion and maybe another reason for a dedicated logbook app.

I often thought, that the konni_logbook_pi has great potential but has been left somehow dormant. It would be much more preferable to "lift the konni_logbook_pi" out of ocpn and use the NMEA (or later even the signalK ) values to feed the logbook and to enrich this with voice memos or even voice activated i/f.

So far I couldn't get anyone interested in such a development - whats is your view?

[cyan]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

...digital signatures have been legally accepted by federal law since the Carter days (something to finally think Jimmy for?)

Hey, Jimmy Carter DID start what would become the craft beer revolution with a stroke of the pen in 1978.
Back to voice recognition....

[hellosailor]

Dockhead-
Yes, Mr. Peabody and I have used the wayback machine many times. And now that you bring it up, that's a perfect case of why "evidence" can be nonsense. The WM apparently took the last snapshot of this forum back in August--six months ago. And takes a snapshot about every 6-8 months for the past couple of years, nothing showing earlier on their timeline. Maybe it is there, maybe not.
You really think some guy at a customs booth is going to look for the wayback machine? Or look at the "last edit" stream of my hard drive, or if I'm not using a journaling storage system...Right, what evidence?
Leftbrain makes a good point, the future of blockchain MAY be in very common use as both evidence and security. But like PGP in the 1980's...that still hasn't made it into common use.
Electronic logging has many potentials. If it works for you, do it. The programming is what Scientific American used to call "A simple exercise left to the reader" (and oh, did that sometimes hurt(G).
But if some bureaucrat who hasn't got a college degree and doesn't know about any of this stuff says "SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS!" don't be surprised if he takes your tablet or whatever and literally throws it back at you.
You figure out a universal system, with authentication and easy field confirmation, so everyone knows (without sending out for analysis) that they are looking at something which might not have come off an etch-a-sketch, and maybe you'll be able to retire early and rich. Maybe.
As for security/vs/evidence? Yeah, as Kinky Friedman said about the Democrats and the Republicans, they're just two sides of the same coin. We need the whole coin, before anyone is going to be pleased to accept it.