I would like to make an edit: functionality for those with disabilities is a huge use-case I did not consider. Thank you for your insightful comments
* Turning on/off lights
* Changing the thermostat set temp
* Asking about the weather forecast
* Add items to a shopping list
* Playing music
If you can't imagine a voice interface being appreciably better than a phone interface for these things, I recommend withholding judgment until you've tried it.
Also, to be very clear (since some people have a knack for arguing points I never made), I'm explicitly not saying that the current hot-mic implementation is technically necessary or ideal, nor that these conveniences justify the privacy tradeoff.
Obviously not every action is easier or more optimal by voice, but having the option is great.
Its rather some deeper info that first few lines of wikipedia article covers, sometimes more. Is your use case valid? For sure for you. But it wouldn't be enough for me, not for the price, upfront and hidden, not for the creepiness it potentially brings. The real time and energy saved for me would be tiny - but that's me. I can still do a bit of 'work' myself.
This reminds me of my recent trip to Aconcagua, highest peak in South (both) America. One US lady had this electric air mattress inflater, and she ran off the charge. She was bragging how smart is she for having such appliances. Rest of the group just smiled and inflated our mattress ourselves, even in 6000m high camp. If you can't do 10 full lungs blows yourself and spend that 1 minute preparing mattress, you shouldn't be up there, by huge margin.
Many people today grew up with cellphones in their cribs. They have no idea what information starvation is like. The experience of receiving information you've been waiting for for weeks or months is exhilarating.
Anyway, when you take the library experience versus the experience of pulling up information from a cellphone the improvement is astronomical. From cellphone to voice assistant, the improvement seems very marginal.
Cell phones even represented a distinct advantage over desktops and laptops in that they were always there on your person. Cell phones opened up the possibility to look up information anywhere. With voice assistants it seems the only advantage you gain over cell phones in that you don't have to use your fingers. That doesn't seem very life changing by comparison, unless you don't have fingers, in which case I will admit your life would be vastly improved.
But the downside is that you're connecting a always-on microphone access to mega-corporations who are looking to monetize your existence. For those of us who grew up without the internet or cell phones the trade-off just makes zero sense. We're willing to use cell phones because they open up new worlds of information access. But voice assistants just seems to create more problems than they solve.
Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line?
My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the cell phone. When my daughter was an infant, it was super convenient to ask it to play soft music as she was falling asleep without having to put her down. Now it's super nice to be able to set multiple timers as I cook with just my voice, instead of trying to fumble with multiple timers on my phone or stove.
I'm not paranoid to think that they are recording everything, because I understand that there would be no ROI for the company to do so with the storage and bandwidth that would be required. And therefore there really isn't much tradeoff at all. Google is already recording every search I do -- does it matter if I use my phone or my Google Home?
IE, using voice commands is a downgrade IMO. Voice commands are not directly discoverable, and there's a lot more magic boxes.
Compare this to the number of taps required to do so in the hue app
I have yet to find a use case for modern voice control that required more than a passing thought about how to word things. Even my technologically illiterate parents can use these devices with relative ease, especially compared to smart phone and desktop computer UIs. Have you actually tried out these devices or are you just assuming they're as bad as they were 20 years ago?
Also, an interaction I had last week:
add x to my shopping list.
ok, I will add x to my shopping list, anything else?
. . .
But I can't add a list, add pears, apples, and oatmeal to my shopping list.
So If I have raw chicken on my hands and want to add shit to my list, it takes so god damn long that I want to punch the fucking thing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706651
[1] https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/36ca7d4c-cd98-...
Any one of those things are just a tiny little convenience, but it adds up, and while I bought one just to see what they'd be like not expecting to use it that much, I now use them dozens of times a day.
If you don't have kids, you have no idea how loud and aggressively they will scream when they want something, and especially when these devices are visible to them (if you "need" to respond to a text message, etc).
Yes, it is a devil's bargain. Yes, I'm sure some families are able to, through sheer force of will, completely restrict access to technology. In my family, we are acknowledging we have lost the battle to prevent them from using technology and are seeking solutions that help them manage their desires and create healthy boundaries. I guess we can all argue over what is "healthy" and "normal."
Things like Google Home and Family Link (all from Google) do allow us to control access in a way that I prefer.
So, this "hack" is really exciting because I do care that my two year old already knows Google as a brand.
I'm open to hearing suggestions and have even attempted to build my own open source alternatives, but using voice is a modality that is preferable for so many reasons, and I don't see alternatives that won't be worse.
There is nothing magical about technology, it's just an application of age-old parenting principles. And there's nothing particularly harmful about technology either, there should be no grand battle: you define the limits and the children should stick to them and respect you as a parent. This is true for all things children want to do, from screaming and playing indoors to accessing communal devices to getting their own devices when you, as a parent determine they should.
Do you have kids, or did you read this somewhere?
What age old parenting techniques are you talking about? The ones older people reminisce about when they lament how bad young people are today? Do you have a source backing up the efficacy of those "proven" techniques?
I'm shocked: Why does your two year old need to know Google as a brand? How or why is this valuable to you? Do you expect Google to exist forever? Its entire revenue model is built on ads. Companies with more robust revenue streams have gone bankrupt in shorter timeframes.
I never said I want my two year old to know the Google brand. She hears her older siblings saying it. It is just what is so with her. But guess what? I'm willing to wager my kids aren't the only ones who learned things from their siblings that their parents don't want them to know about, at least at that moment. My kids are not playing with Barbies and I'm pretty sure body image issues with girls are much worse than exposure to Daniel Tiger.
As for parenting, we may just agree to disagree. I concur with your assessment that siblings will definitely teach more than parents. That's to be expected. We just would never reward bad behaviour with acquiescence. But to each his own. Our seven-year old has wide latitude when it comes to choices and actions, but he also realizes that the consequences of those actions are not in his control. We gave him his own iPad at the age of 3 and access to his own real spending money in Grade 1. He gets to decide what to spend it on. At the same time, we've made it clear to him that poor impulse control and bad behaviour will never get him what he wants. He negotiates everything, including daily bedtime or routine tasks, and we're perfectly fine with that. It seems to align well with his personality, and builds some valuable life skills.
Totally align with not giving in to screaming and yelling, and I'm consistent (or at least aware) about that, but when my youngest is sick and just went down for a nap, well...
Those are good points you make and I'll hope to recall those techniques with my just turned six year old. As you say, building valuable life skills.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...
No one cares if you don’t want to use it. No one needs to justify why they want to use one to you.
Someone who thinks these things are a gimmick, and a harmful gimmick at that, is right to express an opinion about the value these devices add. The same way I'd encourage a friend to quit chain smoking tobacco cigarettes, and not visit his house with my family if it were full of secondhand smoke.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1807/
At some point, I would think he would say it’s none of your business.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...
This will create a lot less noise, which drowns out any meaningful discussion.
For instance, saying that I use a piece of technology because it’s like a recreational drug is not very convincing.
Addressing the line between having an always listening smartphone with a gps, would be a great place to start.
Also, obligatory http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I realize we are quibbling the definition of "nutbar", but my line is drawn at the extreme end, not the moderate end. It's one thing to advocate Haskell as the perfect language for building an OS (crazy talk, but I support it) and quite another to advocate violent uprising against minorities in society (a la StormFront). I hope we can agree that there's a distinction at play here.
I would of course prefer dear friends listening in, but who knows what life will bring.
This seems a lot like "old man yells at cloud". The same could be said for personal computers 40 years ago.
Imagine if you couldn't use your hands or interact with technology due to a disability - these devices would make the world so much easier to interact with.
But do we really need technology to save us any more time? Are we really filling the empty time with worthwhile activities?
The way I see it is if you already own a smartphone then echo or home don't really add additional exposure.
In fact, the nokia 3310 would probably be even less secure than modern phones.
In the iOS ecosystem, Siri can be set up to only listen in response to a button-press (don't remember which is default), and the watch only listens on wrist-raise. Those at least creates some physical barrier to passive listening, even if it requires a certain degree of trust in the devices.
Sure, that's assuming you trust Apple (if you don't, then you might imagine that those settings don't actually do what they say they do). If you trust them, then you're fine. If you're in Google's ecosystem, and you trust Google, then you're fine. Ditto for Amazon. But the point here is that people don't trust these entities.
And then somehow target a smart home speaker, while simultaneously carrying around an always-on, always-connected, geo-located, potential listening device in their pocket, all day long.
I flipped the hardware mic switch off on it, to try to make it a dumb wifi speaker instead of a "smart" one. Then I built a software alarm clock that forces me to leave the room after I wake up in order to turn it off.
For me, it's very important for my alarm clock to be both effective, and to always work. The alarm clock runs as a remote task and connects directly to the mini, telling it to play an MP3 from the local network (by IP because the mini ignores DHCP DNS server). If I hit the mini touch controls to turn it off, the software starts playing a different MP3 a second later. If I try to unplug the cable from the device, duct tape stops me. Thoughtful wrapping of the cable around a solid furniture post prevents any yanking from being effective at tearing it out of the wall. If one mini is down (fairly rare but possible point of failure), the other one is attempted.
So, it's fairly impossible for me to just turn it off without waking up and giving it a bit more thought. I have to leave the room and tap a button on a touch screen (ubuntu in kiosk mode reaching web app on local network).
The unfortunately fatal flaw is that after months of effective use, I recently discovered that my highly available alarm clock was not actually highly available. It breaks when the internet is out. I could not connect over local network. There's always the possibility that something else was a factor, but I reproduced it a couple of times intentionally.
It also concerns me that the mini doesn't require authentication. Anyone on the local network can directly reach the device and do the same thing. A script meant as an alarm clock could turn into a device of psychological torment in someone elses hands. This lack of authentication, and the ability to auto-discover the speakers, is probably something they consider a 'feature'. I don't like seeing Chrome waste system resources in its attempt to scan my local network on the off chance that Google's speakers are there. And I don't want it to reach out to those speakers when it does find them. But it does it anyway.
In the end, with the microphone disregarded, it's a cheap wifi speaker. I won't count Chrome's bad behavior against it, but its software could be improved by offering (any) secure connection options. The lack of internet as a single point of failure dooms any kind of gadgetry with a reliability requirement from using it. It can't be considered reliable enough for serious tasks like waking you up for work or a flight unless they fix the software to work in a local-network-only mode. But, it is cheap, and, well, mostly available, which is often good enough for to-hand use cases.
Speculation: Is the lack of mini's heartbeat phoning home Google's own way of determining network reliability across wide geographic areas (eg, the lack of data in an aggregate area)? But they probably know this already from the wide spread of Android devices. Or do they maybe just not want their device to work unless it can reach back to them?