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> So a sensitive mic per room

Definitely exists, but it won't be inexpensive, particularly if you want only one to cover a large room. You'll be looking for a directional microphone, with a roughly 90 degree cone. Having more than one would be a boon, the narrower the cone, the greater the range (in theory).

> how does one tackle e.g. the privacy problem

If you control the hardware doing the voice processing, it's quite simple: don't log the transcripts or save the audio files. If you can have a set of "this is a command" keywords it makes it even easier, since you can shut off the recognition while a conversation is going on, so long as it didn't start with the command keywords. If you don't control the hardware, you have to place your trust in the person who does control the hardware.

Doesn't have to be that expensive, you can get one or two cheap stereo mics per room and work on the data. Tascam's portable music/voice recorders support a very wide range of input levels.

You can use something like jasper, which is open source and can run on a raspberry pi. You don't need to have it connected to the Internet at all, you could put your home automation and the pi on its own ethernet, not connected to the rest of the world. There's nothing like an air gap.

If you had multiple microphones it might make sense to have one bulkier computer instead of having a pi in each room, but I haven't looked into how much CPU it takes jasper to listen for its wake-up word.

https://jasperproject.github.io/

(thanks and I agree with you, don't get the rest of my post wrong)

Air gapping is not feasible for situations like this in 2015 imo, I mean not for 'medium security' situations like this. For example you'd want to integrate it with the rest of a home automation system, which you'd want to integrate with various online services (weather data, calendars, ip cams, not to mention access from the outside & automatic upgrades). Of course you can build all sorts of 'more secure bridges' and all, but it's just a hobby, I don't want to turn this into a job to maintain - and for mainstream roll-out, such setups are even less feasible.

I mean I understand what you say, my point is that I think that we've moved beyond that - we need to assume for applications that are not life-or-death that they will be internet-connected, and in most situations we also need to assume that they're hostile; nobody can 'know' at any point in time what is really going on in their machines and on their networks in 2015 (again, in situations where you don't have whole teams whose 24/7 job it is to monitor and be proactive).

This seems in contrast with my original question of course :) , but I was more getting at novel approaches to 'security mitigation' - which is vague to the point of useless but that's because I don't even know how to begin solving this for our current age, hence my question. Much like 10 years ago nobody knew about the blockchain and its applications, and some problems that seemed impossible to solve (not just 'technically hard', but 'impossible') maybe aren't that 'impossible' any more now.

I've devolved into rambling and I'm not expecting that someone drops the Big Revelation of the 21st century into my lap in a HN comment either, of course, so I'll just stop typing now :)

I have a radical suggestion for your problem :)..

Buy one of those cute robots in the house things.. Have the user speak to these robots instead of generally speaking into the room.. It feels a lot more natural for human beings and feels less weird since you wont have a feeling of talking to an evil bot that lives in the ether and knows everything about you.

A wearable device?

This is where I can see smartwatches going. Wearable input devices instead of wearable e-mail naggers.

See Amazon echo

Amazon Exho/Alexa is doing overall a good job in my house. Yes technicality it can listen to every words we say at home, but until now it didn't bother me much. I found out recently one guy that had the time to get Amazon Alexa SDK / voices to work in conjunction with my Nest thermostat and recently SmartThings did integrate with the Echo too. So it is now extremely convenient for asking Alexa to set the temperature by voice without the need to lookup for my phone or tablet, same in the evening to simply turn on the lights in a few places. I do think that Voice Control in home automation is going to be a big plus.

My only gripe about the Echo is how 3rd party apps are integrated. I'd prefer it to be seamless. "Alexa, good night." should result in my HA system running a night-time scene. The current “Alexa, ask {Greeter} to {say hello world}.” is cumbersome and breaks the natural language flow. We should be able to have a conversion with the computer, not give it properly structured commands.

How sensitive is an Echo wrt positioning? What I mean is, do you have to put it in a location where you can talk in its direction or do you just put it down and even when you face away from it (let's say, from the couch), it still picks up what you say?

And does it do the voice recognition on Amazon servers or does it do that locally? Well my underlying question (since I can google technicalities like that...) is, how is the latency?