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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> Your phone doesn't have the processing power to do speech-to-text on the fly, so it sends it to a server to do it.

This is what I don't get. I used to play with Microsoft's SpeechAPI back in 2007 and it was pretty decent at real-time speech recognition - almost perfect, if you limited your program to a pre-defined command grammar. It was all done completely off-line, real-time on a machine that had much less processing power than your average smartphone of today. I don't see anything inherent in speech recognition that would require so much processing power that the phone can't handle it real-time. The only reason I see is that continuous moving of everything to cloud because it's easier to capture revenue stream that way.

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The point is that it is a choice, a deliberate choice. Without sending the date, i.e., your output, to corporate servers, they can't profit from your person. Hate to say this and many may believe that it's over the top, but humans are ever increasingly becoming nothing more than a commodity. Kind of like a cow on a ranch. You monitor it and groom it and prepare its feed in accordance with stages of development and tweak your inputs all in order to squeeze the optimal amount of profit out of the cow....I mean human.

Unfortunately, even YCombinator, just like a vast majority of tech companies, are guilty of supporting this notion. There is no respect or regard for privacy and ownership of your person. if it escapes your flesh and bones, it is deemed fair game to harvest by anyone. You and your actions and your speech and your image and your location are a commodity to be optimized for profit. Say moo, mothertrucker.

While I agree that a component is revenue, I also think the "big data" factor of it is important. All of those usage stats (Where/when/what was said/) would definitely help to shape future products and integrations. (50% of people want to order pizza, maybe we should integrate some pizza thing vs. the 5% that want to do advanced math, etc)

EDIT: I'm also one of those guys who's like "no I'm not signing up to X service because they don't need more data about me" but I get the double-edged sword and how more of the right data makes certain decisions easier.

I couldn't agree more with your comment. Maybe there is a way to collect data about user only after they have been anonymized, so the data would contain only what user_xxx does, with no way to map user_xxx to his real identity.

I don't think it's trivial, but I hope to see some regulations coming in the way the data are collected and stored.

Uh, this is just a total misunderstanding of how and why these systems work the way they do.

Of course command grammars are recognized on the device, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn your TV on using a command or use basic functions in a speedy manner.

And, of course they send audio data to a server -- because your TV does not have a complete language model for up to date web search or even tv guide installed a priori. i.e. good reasons that have nothing to do with "capturing revenue stream".

Sigh...

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