Siri can control your smart home and doesn’t phone home (any more). You can hook it up with a raspberry pi to control just about anything, including generic zigbee devices.

Just made this jump recently and have been pleasantly surprised that all stated is true and it's delightful to use. More importantly, I feel as if _we_ use Siri, and not the other way around. Fingers crossed…?

Does the voice recognition work hands free? On phones the microphones were never good enough to be used in the pocket or from a different room and I don't want to hold my phone in ma hand just to turn on the lights.

Another problem is that it's as closed as googles eco system so I don't know what they're doing behind the scenes anyway, if it's not free software then what's the point switching from google to apple?

Apple has a Home Hub device as well.

Also, as a new owner of an Apple Watch (had to back out of Fitbit now that Google bought them, sigh, and this was the most interesting option), the Siri integration with the Watch is fascinatingly better than I'd expect and made me much more interested in using Siri more than I had before. The Dick Tracy-ness of talking to an assistant on your wrist is amusing/fun in general, of course, but so far I've been impressed with the range of both the microphone and speaker for a wrist-worn device, and you don't have to do the Dick Tracy style arm raise (though of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you from wanting to; the amusing long tail impact of old pop culture).

(I'm a pragmatist and don't hold closed ecosystems against them. I am on the side that Apple seems more clear about seeing me as a customer than a product or a black box source of data, and that's more than enough reason for me to switch to them over Google [though in my case I was switching from Windows Phone, RIP].)

Siri absolutely phones home, on every single command.

Yes - sorry you are technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but you can fully opt out of having your spoken commands recorded and reviewed. That was the point I was making.

I don’t know if that’s possible with the other players. None of them have showered themselves in glory but Apple’s track record has been generally positive.

That means you have to buy into another walled garden though.

Not GP but I'm a happy Apple products/services customer. Rightly or wrongly, I feel like I purchase products and services from Apple, rather than the data from my usage of their products being their core product or service.

If something abhorrent from Apple comes to the forefront then I'll happily switch back to self-build + Linux + self-hosted services, but for the time being I'm content.

On the flip side, I've done everything I can to eradicate Google from my life and will continue to do so.

Apple runs special servers for iCloud inside of China so that the CCP can monitor all traffic and more effectively disappear people who transmit information that they don’t like.

I will only access youtube in ways that limit its tracking and anti-features. That means always using Tor and Youtube-dl/Invidious/Newpipe. Never use the official frontend or any of the official apps.

Then you may have noticed that you can’t access Google through Tor. They intentionally send you to a captcha you can never solve.

No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.

Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.

Please re-read my original post, it was about youtube, not search. But I don't think you can get around the Tor captcha on search, so at this time I would say avoid google search entirely if you care about not being tracked.

Presumably the captchas are only on the YouTube UI itself and not on the API endpoints that provide the data.

Assuming Tor Browser, just change Tor circuit, ctrl+l (I believe), until you get one without captcha (works after 2-3 times usually). Only use Google search when absolutely necessary though.

> And then they can listen to everything I'm doing, which is not cool

If this is a concern to you I encourage you to read about hardware-implemented wake words to get a better understanding of how is that the microphone is only recording when you trigger the device. This has alleviated the concerns of a number of people I've spoken to about this. If you concern is about accidentally triggering the wake word and being recorded when you did not intend to be, can't help much with that, but it seems like something of a niche concern.

If this alleviates your concerns, I have a bridge to sell you.

If you trust Google to only activate recording when you say a wake word, why not just send a stream of your audio data and trust them to delete it? If you're trusting amoral corporations whose entire business is selling your data with access to a bug in your house, just go the whole way.

But there are 3rd party apps which can change the wake word so I'd assume it's implemented in software on the Google Home/Nest mini.

Could one use AWS AppStream [0] or Mighty [1] or similar tech to proxy-view YouTube?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2/

[1] https://mightyapp.com/

I bet you would only get a few pages loaded before being captcha'd since the IP is still one of a cloud provider.

It depends. I used to self-host a VPN on DigitalOcean's VPS and didn’t experience any issues when routing all my traffic through it. But I suspected being logged in to my Google account as well as presenting cookies created for a residential IP address helped with that.

Maybe look into Jarvis an open source stt and home automation

RSS of my subscriptions into a youtube-dl script works well enough for me. You could also just watch YouTube with mpv.

What does YouTube have that you can't find elsewhere on the web?

Off the top of my head, videos about:

- how to build a smoker and smoke fish in it - how to butcher a pig - how to DIY motorized roller shades and integrate them into HomeAssistant - a video walk through Hebron - how to make a sabich

and so on and so on, but perhaps I'm just bad at searching for videos? I do it like that:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+make+a+sabich+-site%3Ayoutu... -

90+% of the videos on Youtube.