I am totally opposed to these devices in my home and am, frankly, aghast at the notion that they would see wide deployment or that "voice is the future ... blah blah".
However, I do have the ability to consider other viewpoints and when I do, I am completely underwhelmed by the proposed use-cases of these devices. According to Amazon themselves, the things I could do with Alexa include:
"What's on sale today ?"
"Find me a Chinese restaurant"
"What's the weather"
These are use-cases that suggest a user who either has no particular preferences or is satisfied with extremely simple, non-nuanced information (or both). These use-cases are the literal manifestation of dumbing yourself down far enough for the computer to pass your (very easy) turing test.
Other use-cases like "play my party playlist" are a wash in terms of simplicity or speed vs. just (pressing whatever play button you have in the system you use).
Are there any examples that I would find interesting or nuanced or definitive improvements over existing tools ?
Or I could just curate my playlists more carefully.
Everything else is either too low information density (this is why I get the weather from an app, not The Weather Channel) or more efficiently handled manually (music control, search queries) in most situations
We might just not be the target market.
But what irks me most is the flimsy excuse that sending their recordings (or even a post-processed textual rendering) to the cloud is necessary to perform these trivial operations. We've had desktop voice recognition of the quality necessary to perform these operations for a long time now.
> "What's on sale today ?"
This could access an Amazon (store) API directly.
> "Find me a Chinese restaurant"
This could use a Yelp API directly, as if it were a web browser.
> "What's the weather"
This could use a Weather Underground (or whatever) API. Ideally the device could be configured to source data for these inquiries from various options.
> "play my party playlist"
This shouldn't generate any off-network traffic at all.
at least it should check for drm and weather you paid parking tickets or resell the song otherwise
(assuming you have one)
Is it because, although your smartphone has the ability to listen to you in the same way, it is not the stated aim of the device?
(I know technically it was feasible to use phones as listening devices decades ago, but storage and processing infrastructure was not there to do it on mass scale, and your phone could talk to one company only at any given time.)
With assistants, OTOH, you have a device whose sole purpose is to record and transmit your voice over the Internet. With our cloud-based computing world, this kind of makes the posssibilities obvious.
(Also, I have a particular distaste for solutions that use Internet connection for things that should be done entirely locally. For instance, me asking Google Now for current time, should not require sending data halfway around the planet.)
I can see how smartphones make that possibility less obvious and more palatable even to users who are aware of it.
A lot of phones already listen to audio nonstop. Take the Android phones that listen to "OK Google" or the Apple phones that respond to "Hey Siri". Those features require the phone to listen to and process audio nonstop. Sure, if you don't like that then you can turn it off, but I don't understand why people have concerns about stationary always-listening devices moreso than phones with the same functionality. These base stations or hubs are the same concept, except they're present in a room instead of part of your phone.
All other things equal, I think mobile phones are a much greater threat vector than home hubs. Mobile phones are juicy targets with large, complex attack surface areas. See the various remote code execution exploits in Android that could be triggered by sending someone a message. See the various high levels of privilege that applications have that can be used to spy on you. Did you see the article about how Uber had secret privileges that allowed the app to record iPhone screens? [1]
There are multiple reasons why an attacker would want to compromise your phone (e.g. to steal your data, not just record your voice). Many people have phones, so sophisticated adversaries are more likely to invest the energy into developing attacks. There's a lot more to compromise (apps). Home hubs are less likely to see that same level of scrutiny, and they're less likely to be vulnerable to the same types of attacks and issues because they're much simpler devices (they don't run "apps", they don't communicate on the network except with their vendor).
If you're worried about being spied on, then you should also be worried about other people's phones, which you may not even realize are in the room with you! By comparison it tends to be pretty obvious / known to everyone when there's a home hub present in a room. Your phone probably doesn't have a hardware-level light that tells you when it's recording you, like your home hub does. The list goes on.
[1] http://bgr.com/2017/10/05/uber-app-privacy-issues-iphone-scr...
I think you have to be careful about what it is you care about. Listening isn't it. To the extent that modern phones "listen non-stop" you're just one step away from saying that all microphones are non-stop-listeners.
What matters is what data is available, where it goes, and who can get access to it. If my phone truly only has a small ring buffer with specialized hardware purpose-built to listen for "OK Google", which it is reasonably accurate at, then it's not a privacy issue. The problem is that by visual inspection I can't distinguish that from a system that is listening for "OK Google" and also other politically interesting keywords, or a phone that is just sending all my audio up, etc.
Now, I am a very technically aware person compared to the general population, and I have good reason at the moment to still believe that phones aren't actually spying on the audio level as much as people believe on the grounds that it is technically impossible due to both battery and mobile data consumption. However, it is not entirely comforting that those are the only reasons I believe it is not happening, and improvements in battery technology, CPU efficiency, and/or mobile bandwidth are going to eliminate those assurances for me.
(By contrast, location spying, activity spying, and abundant marketing-based tracking clearly does happen.)
I agree smartphones are bad, but can see how they perceived not as bad as hubs.
In this particular case as far as I understand, disabled means no recording at all, while keeping private means your data is already transferred and access is granted to parties based on how private is defined in the tos.
So for me the answer would be that - while my smartphone can certainly listen to things (as every thing with a microphone can. Who covered all the microphones in their laptops?) - a smartphone offers these things as optional features.
For Google Home and Alexa etc.: The 'listen all the time' (for hotwords at least..) is the single use of these devices. And as soon as you buy into this stuff you might as well allow the cloud storage of your recordings for 'better recognition'.
A smartphone could do the same. But it has a lot of value without doing any of that.
"Said: set alarm for 6:30 in the morning"
"Said: set alarm for 7"
"Said: set alarm for 7:30"
"Said: set alarm for 7:45"
As phones get better and more capable, I do get more worried about this though.
I do use a phone I don't control, and it is mostly sandboxed into social activities. Yes, it does potentially listen to me, and I am aware of it, but it won't take control of anything that is not a social activity.
I have a fair amount of home automation kit deployed which I find fun to monkey around with but the rest of the family never really cared to interact with until the Echo came into play.
[Alexa, self destruct (yes, it knows that one; and responds with a number of alternatives - "Command code not recognized, self-destruct not initiated", "Auto-destruction in 5,4,3,2,1,boom, hmm that did not go as planned" and more)]
These are not big things, but there are lots of little things where before I might have to take my phone out (or find it), or realize with my hands full I forgot to turn the TV off, have to put stuff down and go back into the living room to turn it back off, then pick my stuff up.
I agree: Voice input is cumbersome for anything complex, and I also read fast enough and have a visual enough memory to not want it to read to me. So I only use a fraction of what it's useful for. But the ones I use it for have quickly become very ingrained little conveniences. Turns out you can do a lot with just turn on/off [device/group].
I suppose it's possible that it's still listening, at the same risk you run by having any device with a microphone connected to the internet.
I agree with other commenters who aren't sold on voice commands as efficient, but even my four year old (who can't read) can play music on the Tap.