Re:HomePod Mini
by austinkhale on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @08:59PM
(#24772108)
They don’t tie your request to your Apple ID and you can opt out of any recording being stored. Presumably this would make it impossible for a government body to subpoena your recordings, which as we’ve seen with Alexa is entirely possible.
I think the big brother would always find a way to do that, ip? mac?...
Siri has always relied on external servers so it doesn’t bother much. I agree with your last point, I hope they move towards full on-device Siri
They can and have for many years, it’s just much less powerful than Siri.
On device you can only ask it to play songs on the device, calling people in the phone book etc.
Pretty sure they do transcribe locally and only send text to cloud to interpret it. So still not private, but no audio is sent (unless for special cases).
No – Apple does transmit the audio samples and interprets server-side: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210657
I have no issues personally with using cloud services like this but they very much used weasley language in the presentation and website to obscure the fact that Apple's cloud absolutely will get access to your unencrypted raw utterances following their wakeword detection, and cause people to conclude that that wasn't happening.
As a side-note I find it a bit surprising that with all the history Apple has with Siri and the meaningfully powerful on-device ML acceleration that they still can't download and run a recognition model on-device that wouldn't require streaming your speech to Apple's servers...