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Comment by adam | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if Apple is making a conscious choice to market this as a speaker vs. a Home Assistant. A speaker seems far less creepy to the commoner (no ads, supposedly not listening to every command you request, etc.) and is something everyone can already understand the functionality of. With the nice processor, they clearly are thinking about this as something more than just a speaker that they can upgrade in the future.

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I found it interesting that their nod to privacy wasn't "we'll do all the processing locally", but rather "we won't link this to your account when we send it up to the cloud".

Which is sort of weird, right? Are they doing voice recognition and language understanding in the cloud, then sending actions back to the speaker for local execution of things that require actions to be taken, eg setting reminders & liking songs?

I guess this is how they try and get themselves out of the corner they've painted themselves into with privacy.

they do this with siri on iphone. there is no reason to believe that they would do local processing on home pod

Fine, but do you find this to be a compelling privacy story?

To me it seems like Apple's "commitment to privacy" is running up against some technical realities and isn't much more than marketing fluff.

This is an interesting point. I had the MacRumors live thread up in a tab as the keynote was going on and when I read about the speaker I thought briefly about purchasing it someday. On the other hand, my initial reactions to Amazon and Google's various offerings has been very negative.

I don't think I'll end up with any of them anytime soon, but the difference in reaction was profound.

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