Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person
by lisper on Friday December 21, 2018 @10:53AM
(#18734046)
> find restaurants near me
How does that help me at home? I don't dispute the value of voice recognition on a phone. But we're talking about smart speakers here, in your home, always on.
(BTW, on a phone I can set up common queries like "find restaurants near me" as shortcuts and access them with a single touch.)
> gps represents a bigger value add relative to the trade-off
Yep. Also, I can easily turn my GPS off, restrict apps from accessing it, etc. Home smart speakers are necessarily always on.
1. having a map on your phone doesn't necessitate gps; only automatically locating yourself on that map does, which is an added convenience as opposed to the core functionality.
2. even the core functionality of a map—navigation—is a rarer one than the plethora of things one can connect voice control to
3. apart from taxi integration, probably the most common multiplier of the applicability of gps is voice: "find restaurants near me", etc.
In fairness, even with the above, your comparison is probably still correct: gps represents a bigger value add relative to the trade-off, but I just think they're much much closer than you make out.