Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

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I love and use our 2 google homes on a daily basis, but they get significantly more useful if you are in google's ecosystem and have home automation.

For me, i'd give a super rough guess at my usage like this:

* 60% home automation (turning on and off lights when hands are full, ensuring doors are locked and garage door is closed, running "shortcuts" like "i'm leaving" which will lock up and arm the alarm in 5 minutes, etc...)

* 15% playing and controlling music/tv shows on various devices in the house (tv's with chromecasts, the home itself, etc...)

* 10% as a shopping list (it makes a damn good shopping list and it's nice as hell to be able to just yell at the thing to add "frosted mini wheats to the shopping list" the second you run out and have it synced to the whole family's phones)

* 9% as a "day planner" of sorts. Generally each morning I tell it "good morning" and it tells me the weather, things on my calendar, and starts playing some news snippets I setup.

* 5% for timers/alarms (really useful while cooking to be able to shout at it to start a timer for 15 minutes then walk away)

* 1% for the dumb trivia lookups/random information. Stuff like "how many calories in X?" or "when was the Apple II released?"

Does it have a good shopping list? I've had a Home since they were released and used to use the shopping list feature all the time when it was backed by Keep.

At one point they moved it into some web app that I could only access from my phone by spelunking through the Home app. Has that changed?

When it worked, it was great.

Offtopic perhaps, but that's the one feature I regularly use on the Alexa. "Alexa, add milk to my shopping list" is such a common occurrence in this house that we haven't switched off of the Alexa even though that's basically the only thing I use it for, and even though Amazon keeps making the shopping list worse with every product iteration.

It's in the "Google Express" app now (both a web app, as well as a "native" app).

I didn't like that change, but it does work just as well now, and keeps all the same features (checking it off, manually adding stuff, sharing with friends/family members, etc...).

I do wish they kept it in keep, and even allowed more "lists". Being able to tell it to add a book to my "reading list" would have been fantastic...

I had no idea this Google Express app existed (It's not available in my region of the world).

It's a shame they force you to use it, over just adding to a shopping list in Google Keep.

I was considering getting the Home Mini but now I'm not so sure (grocery list, weather check, and general help (timer/conversions) while cooking would have been my main usage)

There are ways out there using 3rd party services to get the old way back, but I haven't messed with them.

Sorry to be the luddite, but these devices just seem like first-world-only interest to me.

I have no desire to automate my house (I can see why others do). I don't have a home alarm. I have one TV in the house for several kids.

The day planner/shopping list is good, but I pull out my phone instead and speak to it (when I press home button).

Finally, is everyone really comfortable having always-on listening in their home? The convenience/creepy ratio just doesn't seem prudent for me. It's amusing to see how privacy oriented HN is yet these devices are so popular here - they're an unaudited vector into your most private moments.

> It's amusing to see how privacy oriented HN is yet these devices are so popular here - they're an unaudited vector into your most private moments.

HN is an echo chamber where it's not even worth talking about trade-offs when it comes to privacy, all I ever get from it is downvotes.

Well I can tell you why I'm okay with it. Google says (and i've somewhat validated) that data isn't sent to their servers until you say the "keyword". And they do allow you to view and delete any previously sent speech from your account, and I do trust them about that as the backlash from not actually deleting it when they said they would could be pretty bad (and they could be in some pretty deep legal trouble as well).

And if the worry is that they can update it to be "always recording and uploading", they (or another adversary) can already do that with the other phones, laptops, and other devices in the house (most likely more easily).

It's a tradeoff, but it's one that I and my family are comfortable making. Just like how you can choose to not go outside and keep your privacy that way, I find the benefits and usefulness of these products are worth the loss in privacy for me. And that loss in privacy is controllable by me (they can be turned off, unplugged, or shut down whenever I want).

That being said, things like the home-automation are as local as possible. Everything is run via local-network-only systems (zwave, wifi, bluetooth, zigbee), and then "external" systems are added on (like the google home). So i'm not trusting quite as much as people assume I am to some other company, and there are things I will not trust to 3rd parties (like i'm still not comfortable putting surveillance camera footage on anything I don't own myself).

> Sorry to be the luddite, but these devices just seem like first-world-only interest to me.

Probably mostly, but so what? The first world is over a billion people.

What's the difference between having something like Google Home in your home and carrying a cell phone in your pocket, other than the fact that the cell phone can listen in on you even when you're away from home?

I really don't get why everyone carries listening devices 24/7 and then freaks out about these smart speakers.

One is designed to be listening at all times, the other one may not even have the explicit capability (I turn off voice-activated Google/Siri on all my devices).

Trigger words can be accidentally spoken, they can be spoken by other devices, etc. Hidden trigger words can exist.

I think it's logical fallacy of extremes to say that carrying an e.g. iPhone is an equivalent security exposure to having GoogleHome/HomePod/Echos littered around your house, just because they both "could" be hacked/backdoored.

Saying that phones "could" be hacked/backdoored is no more of a fallacy than saying Hidden trigger words "can" exist.

Many (most? all?) modern smartphones are designed to be listening at all times too.

You turn this off on all your devices. Do you trust the manufacturer to actually stop listening when you do?

I don’t see how it’s a logical fallacy to point out that there’s another device with the same capablilities that most of the complainers don’t give a second thought to. I really don’t understand how the risk from something like Google Home is any higher than the risk from a smartphone.

Can you tell me more about this "ensure garage door is closed" thing? Is there something I can buy to make that happen, or do you have some sort of home brewed thing?

Well there is at least one "off the shelf-ish" solution from Chamberlain's "MY-Q" system.

But i'm using a z-wave garage door opener (there are tons of them that hook into most garage door openers) running off a system called "Home Assistant" which is an open-source python-3 based hub for home automation stuff.

The google home can then send commands to home assistant which can do whatever i want there.

So I just have a command for "open the garage door" and a command for "close the garage door" (open as well because your phone can run them as well via Google Assistant there, so I use it as an opener when I'm on my motorcycle via a bluetooth headset in my helmet)

And doing it that way I can also integrate a "close garage door" command into other commands (like "i'm going to sleep" which ensures everything is locked up, or "i'm leaving" which can open it now, then close it again in 5 minutes if I forget to, or other fancy stuff like if there is no movement in the house for an hour, lock up the doors/close the garage if I forgot.)

Neat, thanks!

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