So I, like many on this site, also have privacy concerns about these assistants [1], but I have never seen it [2] give obviously incorrect answers such as your anecdote. Obviously Google Knowledge Graph occasionally gives blatantly wrong answers, so maybe you just caught it on one of those days.

[1] In spite of my concerns, somewhat hypocritically, I have a mini in my bathroom which I received as a gift. I find it quite useful for listening to podcasts/music/audiobooks and switching between them purely by voice.

[2] From both personal usage, and usage at my friends' places, I find Google Homes as accurate as standard Google search, which is to say, very accurate the vast majority of the time.

I get an answer "He is 55 years old" and usually don't have problems with questions. For me a bigger problem is that I don't know the commands so I still haven't been able to request directions home in Maps. To be honest, biggest reason why I'm getting google home mini is to be able to connect my bluetooth speakers to the tv when playing hbo on chromecast

Edit: this made me invest time into figuring out the exact command to navigate so thanks :)

This is the NBU market - Next Billion Users.

India is the world's fastest growing consumer of voice traffic. At this point 30% of all google searches in India are voice and growing.

The fact that we have over 20 mainstream languages contributes to this. a lot of people now write Indian vernacular in Latin script which is highly unstandardised in spelling.

Voice is far far superior.

Voice is potentially superior only for a set of unambiguous questions - e.g. the temperature outside and that is assuming that the recognition part works.

Voice is superior when your language isn't Latin-based.

Billions of Chinese use voice as a main input for phones.

most people are not using for "knowledge base" kind of questions. they are using it for typical google search usecases where the results are often returned in text ...or more preferably video.

in fact there is a cool Alexa-for-the-poor that works on phone calls in India (through a toll free number) powered by Google Assistant : https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-assis...

Voice is the most powerful UX that people in countries like India are using.

That's just utterly wrong.

I have Alexa's and one Google home at home.

We now have cheap and good enough multiroom audio, voice controlled. It's used daily

We use very regular the weather forecast and timer and control our lights with it as well.

The future is here but it will probably go more in direction of offline assistance.

The integration in Philips hue, with more av receiver etc. Will just become even better.

I was surprised too. But then somebody gifted an Echo Show 5 to my parents and they have become an ardent users of it - great sound quality, no need to take out an app and fiddle with it to listen to music and manage BT connection with a speaker, just tell it what to play and it will do that.

What is amazing is how Amazon made an ecosystem around it to hook people to it - my parents were given a free years worth of amazon prime along with their broadband connection but they did not use it much. Then somebody gifted them a firestick and suddenly the prime subscription made sense because of prime videos. Now, they have an echo show 5 which is justifying the prime subscription even more because of prime music.

They don't know enough to be scared. Or they do and the temporary convenience appears to be worth sacrificing the long term freedom. As someone that has had many addictions, I can relate :-)

I know the risks. I just accept the risk-convenience tradeoff. I know plenty of people who work in infosec but have an Alexa (including myself).

Yes, I know infosec people that use gmail and linjedin too. Knowing isn't caring.

True. For a lot of these things, my threat model is very different from the average HN user's. I don't care in the same ways.

I personally fear privacy-related issues stemming from random people I may encounter online far more than I fear privacy-related issues related to NSA dragnet snooping or Google and Amazon monopolies. I have issues with them, and I'm aware of the risks, but in general I don't care much in a personal sense. I do care in a larger societal sense (these are all slippery slopes that are harmful to society), and I care about other people caring and believe their privacy wishes should be respected, but that doesn't change my personal behavior.

I got a free Google home mini from Spotify. It's fairly convenient for music and weather checking when I don't want to grab my phone. And it's great for when I don't remember where I _put_ my phone.

Haha :)

Indeed!

Benjamin Button