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Comment by zahrc | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see this. Privacy and transparency is important when it comes to voice assistants.

So far I’ve tried to stay away from google home, Alexa etc. I occasionally use Siri, e.g. to bulk delete my alarms, but most of the time I’d rather do it myself.

Voice assistants ensure accessibility and have use cases in emergency situations, but shouldn’t be abused for advertising and data hoarding…

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Agreed. I really feel like I’m missing out on the voice assistant revolution, but I can’t trust Amazon or Google to be on all the time at my home.

That said, I have some fear this will just not live up to Google and Amazon’s resources and it may only be a shell of what you can get with those assistants.

I disagree there is a revolution. But maybe I'm just old. Nobody I know over 30 buys those things. Heard plenty of stories about people being served ads showing what they talked about 1 hour ago.

I recall some kickstarter maybe that consisted of a white-noise-type speaker physically mounted on top of a smart device that would stop passive listening, anyone remember this

Project alias?

https://github.com/bjoernkarmann/project_alias

Same idea, the product I saw before was from a different maker I think. Appreciate the info regardless

I'm having a hard time getting on board with "data hoarding" being used to mean privacy invasion instead of archiving publicly available data.

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