Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo
by TeMPOraL on Monday January 07, 2019 @02:28AM
(#18843436)
I concur. For me it's similar wrt. annoyance/efficiency factor, but I have the opposite needs in terms of the microphone. I don't use my phone's Google Assistant because there are only two workflows where I would find it useful, and I can get neither of them to work.
Workflow one is leaving it on a desk and having it listen for the hotword all the time. No "screen must be unlocked" or "phone must be charging" nonsense; if I have to come to the desk and fiddle with the phone, I'll do what I need faster with my fingers. Workflow two is always listening when I'm on a Bluetooth headset. I can accept pressing a button on the headset to turn it on, but again, if I have to fiddle with my phone to get it to listen, it defeats the entire purpose of the tool.
(I'm also an old curmudgeon that is convinced speech recognition can be done entirely off-line, and there's no direct reason to send voice data to the mothership. But I guess it's fighting with windmills at this point.)
It is almost always somewhere between faster and much faster to pull out my phone, switch app, type, than to waken up the device, ask it, wait for an excuse, rephrase my question and wait for it to read it.
That said it shows promise and if I still trusted Google I'd be somewhat enthusiastic :-| (Now I'm mostly scared.)
Since I do not trust them I have it in my office and turn the mic off when I'm not experimenting with it.
Next up: figure out if that mic is actually disabled in hardware if I "turn it off".
@Googlers: a good step forward wrt trust would be to allow the semi paranoid ones like me to turn on the mic on my phone on demand. I can live with the annoyance of tapping some button three times or whatever.
After China and a bunch of other stuff I do not trust you to value your relationship with your customers over your relationship with your bank.