I would like to meet the person who bought an Alexa device at any point in time thinking "now here is finally the privacy protecting AI assistant I have been waiting for."
There are exactly two companies which make a device capable of actually integrating with every home automation and voice control, so given the options, I assumed Amazon would have fewer evil ideas than Google, seeing as the mechanism for Amazon profiting off the data directly is clear and the mechanism for Google has 100 teams building different products to consume that data in 1000 ways I can't begin to consider.
So yeah, given the dichotomy, it seemed like a clear privacy decision to me.
But why do we need these in the first place? I have a free Apple home that I can’t find much of a use for aside from being a speaker. Is it that hard to get the weather or turn lights off from your phone? I definitely don’t want to order products from an audio interface. What else am I missing?
What if you aren't currently holding your phone, with it unlocked and the (probably slow to load) app open? What if you don't have switched outlets, and want to turn off lights either a) when the room is still dark, or b) when you're leaving the room?
Voice assistants are not a revolution in home living, but lets not go too far in the other direction and ignore that they do still have useful features.
Almost every instance of "useful features" described, yours included, seem much more like novelties than true utility to me. I get that this is the old man in me.
Same as AI. It's almost like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for useful products, since capitalism demands people churn out endless useful products, regardless of whether they actually exist or not, so we're trying to make not-useful products into useful products to appease the machine...
I can generally speak to my iPhone and have it recognize and carry out what I say when it's still in its holster on my hip.
Anything that's set up in HomeKit is directly accessible through Siri, and IME most smart-home devices these days support HomeKit, even if they have their own apps as well.
So I don't need to have any app open, or my phone unlocked or even in my hand, in order to turn on and off the smart outlets I have in my house.
(That said, I also have a HomePod mini, because not everyone in my house keeps their phone on their person at all times—plus it's a nice speaker for the kitchen.)
I've participated on their forum for years and a I've seen enough of the code to feel good about it
certainly more confident than the alternatives, and I know with certainty the voice assistant I'm running doesn't leave my home because I configured and verified it myself
