Not true. Apple has demonstrated how to do it and has published a paper on the topic.

A. Bhowmick et al. Protection Against Reconstruction and Its Application in Private Federated Learning, 2018.

Don’t just dismissively say “oh that’s different and doesn’t apply” until you read it and understand the range of problems Apple is tackling with this and similar approaches. A lot can be done when the organization makes privacy a priority.

Let’s not forget I am replying to a person who has chosen to use a throwaway account for this topic. Why did they do that? Hmmm.

Is this why Siri has worse performance compared to others?

Hah! Good one. I hope not. I think the Siri people at Apple have just gotten lazy. Maybe they are too impressed with themselves and focusing on BS things like sports scores. I hope they get more ambitious soon.

^This. I'm sure they're optimizing to only transcribe data they are pretty confident they got wrong (multiple requests; use has to go in and correct), but if you want software to do what the Google Home software does, you have to do this.

There are a lot of things that Google could have done better in this situation without meaningfully impacting their software's quality.

I guess. I'm still not of the opinion anything being done here is really 'wrong' (unless the annotators are mis-using the data).