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Comment by qchris | Hacker News Reader

I don't even really use any other Apple products, and have never really been particularly comfortable with smart assistants, but I have to say that the steps that they've taken here with E2E, non-AppleID-tied identifiers, on-device computation, and of course the really good price point have got me seriously considering a purchase from them for the first time in a long time.

For my family members that already have Apple products for their tablet, phone, etc., but have either Amazon Echo or Google Home smart assistants, I'm definitely looking that these as an option for holiday presents.

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I'm pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, iPad, MBP), but when it comes to smart speakers, I've always used a combination of Echo and Alexa-compatible Sonos devices.

The Alexa devices have always bothered me. Not just because of the baseline privacy concerns, but because it seems so damn easy to activate the trigger word on accident. The absolute worst part being a false positive activation of my Sonos system while watching a movie/show. When this happens (and it happens a lot), the audio volume of the show is lowered significantly to allow Alexa to hear the rest of the command.

Pause the show, wait til "she" stops listening, rewind the show very slightly because I missed whatever was just said due to the volume shift, resume the video, instantly pause again at the moment she was originally triggered until she stops listening, resume the show, this time without having to rewind since I paused soon enough not to miss any dialog.

Maddening.

And the fact that all of these false positives get sent straight to Amazon doesn't make me feel great.

I didn't need a HomePod for its audio quality since I already have great quality with the Sonos system, and couldn't justify the original HomePod's price as a command/control-focused smart speaker with a home already filled with Alexa devices.

All of that to say, HomePod mini is perfect for me.

I can throw out my Echos, disable Alexa on the Sonos system, and scatter a couple of Minis to replace the Echos.

This is something I didn't realize I wanted.

>> The absolute worst part being a false positive activation of my Sonos system while watching a movie/show.

South Park, being; well, South Park - actually did an episode taking advantage of this and trolling thousands of viewers:

https://mashable.com/2017/09/14/south-park-alexa-google-home...

(not really SFW content, strong language)

Binged Schitt’s Creek over the last few weeks and David shouting “Alexis!” triggered all of my Sonos speakers. Every. Single. Time.

I mean, if you binge The Witcher TV series you’ll probably trigger your apple voice products a lot. It’s the unfortunate consequence of choosing real names for virtual assistants. Only google home is really immune to this.

I know exactly what you mean, but if you say "cancel", it will shut it off faster. It is still a big annoyance which I hope gets fixed at some point in the future.

Can Homepod Mini control Sonos?

The new generation Sonos support airplay2, so I guess so. To an extent at least.

Sounds like you'd benefit from some sort of an automation script where, when a movie or a show starts playing, Alexa is disabled.

Alexa is just creepy.

I suspect that the device is constantly recording the audio in your room, and sending that to Amazon’s servers in the cloud. Because I doubt that the little puck has enough processing power inside it to handle speech recognition.

This allows Amazon the ability to continually upgrade their servers, without the need to upgrade the puck.

And only when the server detects it’s prompt, “Alexa”, will it send a response back to the puck. This is how the little device appears to be so responsive.

And not surprisingly, this bit of functionality is not marketed by Amazon. After all, who the hell in their right mind, would want to be constantly monitored, and have all their private conversations at home be secretly recorded by Amazon.

In fact, I suspect that all the voice assistant devices from other manufacturers, like Google, are doing exactly this.

re: on-device computation, you'll note from the presentation that they said that no data is sent to Apple _until you say "Hey Siri"_. They're still doing transcription in the cloud which requires sending your voice for Apple to process and store.

I have no issues personally with using cloud services like this but they very much used weasley language in the presentation and website to obscure the fact that Apple's cloud absolutely will get access to your unencrypted raw utterances following their wakeword detection, and cause people to conclude that that wasn't happening.

As a side-note I find it a bit surprising that with all the history Apple has with Siri and the meaningfully powerful on-device ML acceleration that they still can't download and run a recognition model on-device that wouldn't require streaming your speech to Apple's servers...

They don’t tie your request to your Apple ID and you can opt out of any recording being stored. Presumably this would make it impossible for a government body to subpoena your recordings, which as we’ve seen with Alexa is entirely possible.

I think the big brother would always find a way to do that, ip? mac?...

Siri has always relied on external servers so it doesn’t bother much. I agree with your last point, I hope they move towards full on-device Siri

They can and have for many years, it’s just much less powerful than Siri.

On device you can only ask it to play songs on the device, calling people in the phone book etc.

Pretty sure they do transcribe locally and only send text to cloud to interpret it. So still not private, but no audio is sent (unless for special cases).

No – Apple does transmit the audio samples and interprets server-side: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210657

I'm not pretty sure. Now Siri sends voice to cloud after triggered by wake up word.

> non-AppleID-tied identifiers

One thing I've learned is the identity is absolutely everything in (mass) surveillance.

The more places we can disconnect or obscure this as end users (or ideally consumers) the better.

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