Re:Google Home
by palebluedot on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @03:23PM
(#11724972)
One key difference is power consumption, and to a lesser extent, data consumption. It is not practical for your mobile phone to continually spy on everything you say, due to battery issues; however, it can listen for a keyword to wake up to, and then do the more high-powered voice recognition. So the scope is limited, or you will just have a dead phone in your pocket (which, of course, will also not be listening to you).
With something like Echo / Home, the always-on power source makes it technologically feasible for it to always be listening to you as well, without needing to wake up to a keyword. Now, they may as a feature only start processing based on a keyword, but you don't have the "comfort" of knowing that it is technological limitation rather than a software decision that may or may not be in your control.
For most people, its a permanent fixture on their person: people these days leave their home more than they leave their phone.
> Echo/Home are explicitly audio surveillance devices, though ostensibly benevolent in their design.
Echo/Home are no more explicitly audio surveillance devices than cell phones are.
> I can't say the same for Echo/Home, and it somehow feels qualitatively different in that phones aren't designed to be always-on microphones constantly processing audio to send it off to a server somewhere else for analysis.
Modern phones (considering the hardware and software stack together) are, in fact, designed to do just that, both Siri and Google Now voice recognition works (though it is, IIRC, disabled-by-default in the latter case) from the lock screen. Its just as always-on as Echo/Home.