Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by mikepurvis on Thursday October 17, 2019 @12:55PM (#21283967)

To be fair, most of that doesn't require the internet— it would be perfectly possible to build a simple learning thermostat that was offline, or perhaps was only periodically online (eg, dumping a compact data log while it's connected to your laptop for its yearly firmware update).

I feel the same way about voice assistants. Recognition can be done locally— playing your playlists or turning the lights on and off should require no internet connection. Updating a todo list or calendar, maybe, but then it should be an API call to that service provider, indistinguishable from an action originating in any other third-party app.

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Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by pmlnr on Thursday October 17, 2019 @03:07PM (#21285358)

Eons ago Nokia phones were able to learn "voice commands" tied to certain numbers. This was in the dumbphone era.

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Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by rtkwe on Thursday October 17, 2019 @04:11PM (#21285910)

My limited interaction with those was that they were pretty universally terrible and would not be acceptable today (and were bad enough to be annoying then even).

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Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by pmlnr on Friday October 18, 2019 @04:23AM (#21289567)

Sure, they were. But it was a Symbian, with memory measured in KB, not in GB, CPU in low MHz range, not GHz. I only wanted to point it out that even though it was bad, it was possible, and with phones today, it's not only still possible, but maybe even possible and reasonably good. All that offline, of course.

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