Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that's a hardware mute.

Is it really smart if you've removed the ability for it to respond to voice commands ?

Yea - I don't think voice commands are a feature particularly desired for speakers. There are only a few instances I can think of where I want my speaker to respond to voice commands - when I'm in the shower and when I want it to be silent so I can take a call being the primary ones. For the former I think just having a playlist on shuffle is good enough and the for the latter there are better solutions available by integrating my phone into the system.

Using voice commands to control music has always seemed like a sisyphean task to me. You're using a control method that directly conflicts with the state you'll generally use it in and song/artist names are so dense and confused that oftentimes you'll need multiple commands to hone in on what you actually want.

My "smart speaker" (aka desktop computer with massive speakers) is simply controlled by spotify sync which is absolutely not amazing but it's also not not terrible and far easier to control than times I've tried shouting at voice devices in the past.

The mic in these home devices is, imo, 90% for cooking and 9% for other alarms and timers - they're relatively poor music platforms and only moved into the space because of how subsidized they were by Amazon and other companies.

So what you wanted was a wireless speaker? I think when most people say "smart speaker" they mean a speaker that they can control using the speaker itself, so not just a speaker tethered via bluetooth/wifi.

Considering the only apparent difference between the two is method of control and people love complaining about voice analysis miscomprehending I doubt there is much distance between those two terms in most consumers minds. I think in general marketing loves slapping "smart" in front of other nouns and it's usually received a lot worse than they expect to the point where most consumers ignore it as much as other fluff terms like "Next Gen".

The difference for me is a lot broader. A wireless speaker to me mostly means a bluetooth speaker. A smart speaker means internet connected, firmware updates, feature-creep, TOS/EULA crap and a probably-sooner-than-I-expected end-of-life.

I just started mentally replacing "smart" with "spy" in product names a few years ago, and it's been a generally helpful heuristic as to their tradeoffs.

> physically scraped out the MEMS microphones.

I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?

Pretty certain! I inspected the board closely, and tested after reassembly to make sure it couldn't hear me anymore. That Nest Mini lives with its mute-switch permanently engaged anyway, just as a fallback.

I like this approach.

But can you safely do this with multi room devices?

Hardware mute until they switch the speaker output pins to input mode and use the speaker itself as a microphone.

Speakers much larger than headphone speakers tend to be very poor at such a thing since it gets a lot harder to move the voice coil as weight and pressure from the surround dampen everything. Anything capable of reproducing appreciable bass will almost certainly not work.

This is interesting because I remember interviewing a UX manager candidate at Google around 2019 who was coming from the Alexa team at Amazon, and his feedback even then was that Alexa was never going to be profitable and that he -- and many others -- were trying to get out while the getting was good. It, just like Google Assistant, is just suffering a very slow death.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.

"They" or in this case, Apple, has. This is largely why the latest Siri AI enhancements went over so poorly. Hallucinations when trying to get important personal data or accomplish important tasks are not viewed terribly fondly.

You're giving Apple too much credit in a way that their press releases are carefully crafted to encourage you to. The on-the-ground reality is that Siri will sometimes prompt me for permission to ship her mangled speech-to-text out to a very stale ChatGPT model and read what comes back. That's not failure by hallucination, that's failure by duct taping on an extra limb and wondering why it isn't useful.

They have. You can switch your Android phone from the old Google Assistant to Gemini. I don't like it, so I use Gemini separately by going to the Gemini URL, leaving the assistant as is. It may be dumb, but it's useful. Just like you wouldn't replace your Bash with a GUI, at least not for some values of 'you'.

Google Assistant is going away soon so this won't work anymore.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/end-of-life-gemini-wi...

I wonder how that will affect older devices, like Android TV streaming boxes, where you use the assistant through the remote.

I see that the article mentions this, but I'm skeptical. I think that the assistant will just be switched off, and that will be it; no more using the older Android TV box to ask for today's weather or search for videos.

I think older and low power devices would actually be easier to port: they capture the audio request, send it to the server, receive an audio response from the server and play it. No local "intelligence" at all.

So you could probably replace the whole backend while keeping things compatible as long as you maintain that simple API.

I think they have all been trying [1][2][3] which is why assessments about voice assistants from 2019 might not apply today.

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

[2]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-apple-intelligenc...

[3]: https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard...

The last thing I need is another bullshit generator.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Weird that this got downvoted, considering that Amazon is currently rolling out Alexa+.

If the complaint was that the product wasn't profitable, wouldn't adding expensive LLM inference costs potentially make the problem worse at least at the outset?

We should make AI generated conversations to overload their surveilance.

It's all fun and games until the import brokerage calls to ask where to deliver the 850,000 rubber dog turds you ordered.

Or the 28,000 tons of coal [1]. Unrelated to LLM (except for the part where I asked Gemini to find the link) but somewhat relevant.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery

Yeah, companies are like that - they'll lie and pretend to be "the good guys" at the start, right up until they're not and change their motto to something besides "don't be evil".

As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.

I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..

I feel you on prioritizing moral work! It took me a long time in my career to finally be able to make that choice (versus taking the first job I could find). I had an extremely moral open source robotics job for 5.5 years and then had to leave and take a less moral but still I think positively moral startup job. I think it’s okay to prioritize your personal financial needs sometimes. In the long term you won’t do the immoral stuff that long if this is how you think - so your own will provides a check to make sure you won’t do it too long.

> right up until they're not

In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.

It's not possible to work for a moral company because it's the government that's immoral and is responsible for corrupting them. Tech is basically the whipping boy for all the government's misdeeds. The government forces tech companies to be dirty (it's against the law to say no to them) and then inflames the public to blame the tech companies for doing it, so that people hate tech and love the government. It's like blaming the hand of the person whipping you while kissing their feet. So until the government stops being evil, there's no ethically safe space for tech workers. We'll just continue to be passed around and used as spoils of war by one twisted regime after another.

Misguided and/or naive.

Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)

As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.

And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.