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posted by mrpg on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the ??? dept.

'OK Google, give everybody in America a free speaker'

Alphabet Inc. should give every household in America a free Google Home Mini smart speaker, a Morgan Stanley analyst suggested Thursday.

The speakers currently retail for $49 each, which would mean spending about $3.3 billion. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote Thursday that would be a "small price to pay" for Google-parent Alphabet. He estimated that the company could compensate for that cost about five times over through the operating profits it generates more generally from retail search over the next five years.

Nowak worries that Google is losing ground to Amazon.com Inc. when it comes to retail search queries, given that more purchases are being made through voice commands and Amazon is widely thought to have a lead on Google in terms of smart-speaker penetration. He projects that roughly 70% of households will have speakers by 2022, and that Amazon will have 1.3 times more speakers in homes than Google will at that point, absent any dramatic action.

Also at VentureBeat and CNBC.

Related: Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Voice-Powered Smart Speakers to be in 55% of U.S. Homes by 2022
Bluetooth Hack Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices


Original Submission

Related Stories

Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market 12 comments

Amazon is dominating the voice-controlled speaker market, according to a new forecast from eMarketer out this morning. The maker of the Echo-branded speakers will have 70.6 percent of all voice-enabled speaker users in the U.S. this year – well ahead of Google Home's 23.8 percent and other, smaller players like Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel, who combined only account for 5.6 percent of users.

The new report backs up another from VoiceLabs released in January, which also found that Amazon was leading the voice-first device market, thanks to Echo's popularity.

While the market itself is not expected to be a winner-take-all scenario, competitors like Amazon and Google will win entire homes, as most consumers have said they wouldn't consider buying a competing device once they already own one voice-controlled speaker.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/amazon-to-control-70-percent-of-the-voice-controlled-speaker-market-this-year/

Gee whiz!


Original Submission

Voice-Powered Smart Speakers to be in 55% of U.S. Homes by 2022 22 comments

Voice-enabled smart speakers to reach 55% of U.S. households by 2022, says report

Adoption of voice-powered smart speakers is taking off. According to a new report from Juniper Research out this morning, smart devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos One will be installed in a majority – that is, 55 percent – of U.S. households by the year 2022. By that time, over 70 million households will have at least one of these smart speakers in their home, and the total number of installed devices will top 175 million.

The new forecast follows other reports pointing to growth in the voice-enabled speaker market, including one from eMarketer this spring which said that 35.6 million U.S. consumers would use a voice-activated device at least once per month in 2017, representing 128.9 percent growth over last year.

Despite the increased adoption of smart speakers with voice control capabilities, the new report points out that the majority of voice assistant usage won't be through these in-home devices. Instead, the most usage will occur on smartphones, with over 5 billion assistants installed on smartphones worldwide by 2022.

Amazon teaches Alexa Japanese for Echo's next destination

Amazon's Echo, Plus and Dot speakers will finally be available in Japan starting next week. To prepare for the devices' arrival in the island nation, the e-retail giant taught the voice assistant how to understand and respond in the Japanese language. Alexa SVP Tom Taylor said the company designed an all-new experience "from the ground up for Japanese customers, including a new Japanese voice, local knowledge and over 250 skills from Japanese developers."

Related: Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Amazon is Working on Smart Glasses to House Alexa AI, Says FT
Google Pulls YouTube off of the Amazon Echo Show
Amazon's Alexa Adds Ability to Order from Best Buy


Original Submission

Bluetooth Hack Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices 22 comments

A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo.

As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne.

BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks.

What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be able to detect the attack. What's even scarier is that once an attacker gains control of one Bluetooth-enabled device, he/she can infect any or all devices on the same network.

These Bluetooth vulnerabilities were patched by Google for Android in September, Microsoft for Windows in July, Apple for iOS one year before disclosure, and Linux distributions also shortly after disclosure. However, many of these 5 billion devices are still unpatched and open to attacks via these flaws.

Source: https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-hacking-bluetooth.html


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by captain normal on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:50PM (10 children)

    by captain normal (2205) on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:50PM (#700714)

    I really don't want any of these things hanging around my place. I plenty of headaches dealing with Android/Google on my semi_smart phone.

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:38PM (9 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:38PM (#700733) Journal

      In spite of the hype, I literally do not know a single person that has one of these.

      I've heard second hand of several people sending theirs back when the Amazon Echo recorded a conversation and emailed it randomly. [washingtonpost.com]

      What I haven't heard is how many millions of dollars that family was paid to STFU.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:51PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:51PM (#700736)

        I'd consider buying a smart speaker if it didn't require a connection back to a 3rd party. But, they all do for various reasons and I don't trust them because of the kinds of things that you linked.

        It's bad enough that smart phones can potentially have their microphones turned on without the user knowing about it.

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:26PM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:26PM (#700745) Journal

          I understand why they do. Running a smart speaker requires a huge database of patterns to match against. This doesn't make it a good idea.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:23PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:23PM (#700773)

            Large database? Or, they could do like Google did with Android and just have it respond to a specific phrase and command. You don't need a particularly large database for that, you just need the necessary machine learning to recognize a relatively small number of words.

            Dragon had voice recognition software that exceeded the needs of a device like this back in the '90s when you couldn't assume a computer was ever connected to the internet and if it did, wasn't constantly connected. And even when it was connected to the internet, you couldn't download very much in the background without bringing the entire transfer rate to a crawl.

        • (Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:31PM

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:31PM (#701090)
          --
          SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:06PM (3 children)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:06PM (#700760) Journal

        I've heard second hand of several people sending theirs back when the Amazon Echo recorded a conversation and emailed it randomly.

        What I find somewhat hilarious about all of this coverage is that potential surveillance devices are nothing new in most people's homes. Most people these days have a tablet and/or smartphone they often even carry with them -- a device that generally has a microphone and multiple cameras. Even before that trend, many people were already buying laptops and desktops with built-in microphones and/or cameras.

        All of these devices are frequently running proprietary software (just like the smart speakers) and generally have 3rd-party proprietary apps. And how many people just click "yes" when a new app asks for access to potential surveillance elements on their smartphone or tablet? (So they may have even given permission in some cases for surveillance...)

        The ONLY thing new about these smart speakers is that they talk back, and hence people seem more aware that the thing might actually be listening to them. But your phone may have (and potentially was) recording your conversations and emailing them to the NSA for the past decade or more. And we only have the word of companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft that such weird bugs allowing silent surveillance haven't allowed similar behavior before. ("Oops... turns out some of our advertising partners have been listening in and mining your conversations for data for the past few years... gee, who knew??")

        Nobody seems to care about that. But encounter one weird bug in Alexa, and suddenly people are calling up the WaPo and wondering, "Gee, they might be spying on us?!"

        I mean, great -- if this is what it takes for people to wake up and realize what they've voluntarily brought into their houses, that's probably good. Except the coverage is way too focused on smart speakers. WaPo should have segued halfway through that story into the bit about how we've had devices like this on our persons for a long time... but I guess that's too much thought. The last paragraph of the article you linked hints at it -- but doesn't actually go there.

        • (Score: 2) by Apparition on Sunday July 01 2018, @06:15AM (2 children)

          by Apparition (6835) on Sunday July 01 2018, @06:15AM (#700899) Journal

          You can theoretically disable microphone and camera access from Android and iOS apps. Not that I trust it much and re-verify that they're disabled after app updates, but the options are there. One of the first things I did on my iPad was disable Siri as thoroughly as possible.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @07:40PM (#701034)

            "One of the first things I did on my iPad was disable Siri as thoroughly as possible."

            translated reads...

            "i willingly fund the enemies of free humanity every chance i get, but i'm 'concerned' about my privacy so i clicked on some Slave Reassurance Buttons to make myself feel better. i don't care about the closed source modem firmware or the baseband OS doing whatever the hell they want, assuming i'm dumb enough to trust the main slaveOS"

            • (Score: 2) by Apparition on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:57PM

              by Apparition (6835) on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:57PM (#701105) Journal

              Hey, if there was a viable 10" open source tablet (hardware and software), I'd be all for it and would have gladly chosen it instead. Sadly, there isn't. The iPad is the bad choice in a sea of terrible choices. I had hoped that Sailfish and the Jolla tablet would take off, but c'est la vie.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:01PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:01PM (#700973) Journal

        I know one guy I car pool with in the morning who has it. Every other day he tries to use it in the car to look up stuff, play music, etc. After a year he has yet to get it to work a single time.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:52PM (9 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:52PM (#700715) Journal

    Like the Normal Captain above - don't do me any favors. If you ship me a "smart" speaker, I'll just trash the damned thing.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:03PM (#700718)

      for every rodentprimate.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:09PM (4 children)

      by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:09PM (#700722)

      I'd take it apart and sell the pieces on ebay. Actually, there might be a business idea in there somewhere.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35PM (2 children)

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35PM (#700731) Journal

        Alphabet Inc. should give every household in America a free Google Home Mini smart speaker

        I'd take it apart and sell the pieces on ebay.

        So, if Alphagoogle gives us free smart speaker devices, we own them, right?

        Rather than disassemble mine, I'd rather load Mycroft.ai [mycroft.ai] on it. Mycroft is my "smart(alec) assistant" of choice, free/libre software and protocols. It has fewer (and less well-developed) skills and a lower intelligence than the corporate AI devices like google assistant itself, or alexa, which I consider to be a pesky detail that stands a good chance of disappearing with time.

        I currently run Mycroft on my main desktop PC (a ten-core Xeon monster) but am working on migrating it to a single-board ARM computer (A FriendlyArm NanoPC T3) in a custom-built device. If Google were to send me a pre-built device capable of running it, so much the better.

        • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:49PM (1 child)

          by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:49PM (#700756)

          Last I heard, was told....sometime back in the 80's, that if someone mails something addressed to you, you can keep it obligation free.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:27PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:27PM (#700774)

            Yes, that's true. That's just basic contract law. If somebody sends something to you without some sort of agreement about compensation, you're not required to give it back or compensate them for it.

            In practice, you might want to be a nice person and return it to sender, but it's not a legal requirement.

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:29PM

        by anubi (2828) on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:29PM (#700962) Journal

        Actually, if it has repurposeable parts, I may collect a few. Just like the CueCat that has already been mentioned several posts below me. If it has a reflashable processor, and I can get some specs on how to repurpose it, I will go for it... but to bring the thing into my house and plug it in... I had just as soon give my housekeys to someone I do not know.

        I even keep my phone powered down because all too often, I find the thing has turned itself on in the middle of the night and run its battery down. Why, I do not know. Probably the same reason my neighbor's garage door occasionally opens in the middle of the night... noise - interpreted as a command - is my best guess.

        If someone did turn it on for snooping, there is little of interest for them... the inside of my pocket isn't very interesting. Nor do I do any important business deals. Now, if I ever did things where an eavesdropper could profit handsomely from monitoring some of my doings, I would don my tinfoil hat and make a metal tin to keep my phone in to act as a faraday shield.

        I've already seen enough ( from the old Cheaters Spy Shop and the like ) that the same technologies used for catching cheating spouses may also be used to eavesdrop on business deals, like how much they are going to bid on a contract. That information may be worth enough to bug the guy's phone for it... especially knowing even if the bugee finds out he's been bugged, his info went to an untraceable phone.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35PM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:35PM (#700732) Journal

      Well, you'd probably need to ask for it anyway, as otherwise, how should Google know where to deliver it?

      On the other hand, it would be an effective way for Google to collect street addresses.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:20PM (1 child)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:20PM (#700741)

        The streetview camera van could chuck boxes out the back using a trebuchet as it drives down the road.

        Google already has all the street addresses.

        • (Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:32PM (#700794)

          Sort of a reverse garbage truck?

  • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:07PM (2 children)

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:07PM (#700720)

    I recall about 10-15 years ago on /. there was a submission about how some sheriff or something from a tiny town in Arkansas or similar suggested putting a camera in everyone's house to make sure they were following sex laws or something.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:17PM (#700727)

      No, that was Hillary talking about Bills office.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:55PM (#701500)

      "I recall about 10-15 years ago on /. there was a submission about how some sheriff or something from a tiny town in Arkansas or similar suggested putting a camera in everyone's house to make sure they were following sex laws or something."

      That was the city of Yakima, WA: https://www.yakimawa.gov/ [yakimawa.gov]

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Uncle_Al on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:09PM

    by Uncle_Al (1108) on Saturday June 30 2018, @05:09PM (#700725)

    Should be at the top of the list to get one.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by SomeGuy on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:04PM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:04PM (#700737)

    "Alphabet Inc. should give every household in America a free Google Home Mini smart speaker, a Morgan Stanley analyst suggested Thursday."

    How much were they paid to say that?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:03PM (#700759)

      It was an NSA directive to have a spy in every home.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:09PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:09PM (#700738)

    given that more purchases are being made through voice commands

    There's a lot of "silicon valley tech" products that are built under the assumption the buyer is a rich young urban hipster incel perma single person with no friends.

    If more than one person ever accesses your house, the first thing you do is disable online ordering. I have kids so thats the first thing I disabled. Obviously google has no reason, not being a middleman, to ever disable anything for anyones convenience, so their product will suck for anyone who's not a single shut-in.

    Note that the biggest problem is not 007 spy novel bullshit or framing people for crimes, its just casual joking around. My buddies would rick roll me by yelling thru the window when they visited "alexa, play never gonna give you up" or whatever, but they also yelled stuff like "Alexa, order a dragon dildo" and stuff like that, although I'd already disabled voice ordering (which is Amazons only hope for profitability...) because I have kids and I'm so not letting them order whatever they feel like.

    There's nothing wrong with perma single shut ins having a cool tech product to play with, have fun guys, but the problem is the market can be flooded at a microscopic fraction of the total national population. 70% of the population is somewhere between 10 and 100 times too large of a target market.

    Off the top of my head, at least a couple years ago, Alexa could not understand the concept of a household having more than one member aka more than one amazon account. They're not doing voice fingerprint analysis and identification, at least not for ordering shit, at least not for non-NSA activities. IF they did AND if it actually worked (more likely to have perfect self driving cars, LOL) then it would be interesting if I could interact with Amazon via any Alexa speaker in the universe, but ... you can't. Each speaker is 1:1 mapped with "root access" on one account plus or minus some options.

    Oh and yes I've also gotten trolled IRL with bullshit like yelling "Alexa set an alarm for 3 A M" and she'll happily comply. Arguably Alexa is already too wide open for security already.

    Then there's stuff thats semi-icky but not entirely practical. Like leave a window open or other sound access to Alexa, yell into a house "Alexa, wheres my stuff" and she'll tell you whats arriving and when, in case you'd like to steal a delivery. It would be nice to have an echo on the patio so I can listen to music while cooking dinner, but I don't want deliveries stolen. I suppose being able to leave something of value like a $50 Echo on my patio without it being stolen is ridiculous level of white privilege and housing discrimination right there, but whatever.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:57PM (#700770)

      on the patio so I can listen to music while cooking dinner

      I remember when we used to have boom boxes for that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @07:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @07:06PM (#701024)

      In my experience most of the Alexa shit is owned by married couples who love improving their life style. I think you have confused two different things that annoy you to be the same. P

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:16PM (#700740)

    Supposedly iphone and android users run in packs such that most iphone users know other iphone users and likewise for android phones.

    I find it interesting that WRT:

    Amazon will have 1.3 times more speakers in homes than Google

    In IRL I don't know many people with Amazon echo devices, but I know a grand total of zero google speaker product users. I saw one once at a department store, they do exist.

    I predict similar to cell phone, pack like sociology behavior WRT the tribe of Alexa users vs the tribe of "OK google" users. Like online cartoons that only dogwhistle to one group, paid placement TV shows pretending the other group is unpersoned, etc.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:57PM

      by Arik (4543) on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:57PM (#700799) Journal
      "paid placement TV shows pretending the other group is unpersoned"

      Which will be hilarious, since they're both right.

      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:35PM (#700752)

    May cost a whole lot less than 3.3b if google doesn't have to send them to people who are incarcerated. On the other hand, will whoever refuses one of these get incarcerated as a potential threat?

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)

    by istartedi (123) on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:36PM (#700753) Journal

    Anybody else remember the CueCat? You were supposed to scan ads in magazines with it and get offers and stuff. LOL, nobody did that but they re-purposed it as a fun little bar-code scanner. At the very least, this tech has a speaker and I bet it'd has other things that hardware hackers could use so by all means, send it.

    Of course this is a bit different because some people are actually using it already. If the rest of us *really wanted it* though, we'd probably already have it so what's the point? It might as well be a CueCat to me.

    Also, the analyst should have gone one step further and recommended that Google should bribe the government to make the tech mandatory, knock us down and put a boot on our neck if we don't comply.

    This tech might be interesting to me some day; but when the ship's computer is being controlled by Ferengi I don't want it.

    --
    Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:59AM (#700823)

      You can still get :CueCats. I have one.

  • (Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:55PM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:55PM (#700758) Homepage Journal

    It's also a mic. A good mic -- reliable -- is so important! I was debating Crooked Hillary, right? They gave me a defective mic! Wonder, was that on purpose? Think about it!!!

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)

    by edIII (791) on Saturday June 30 2018, @07:10PM (#700761)

    Both Amazon and Facebook have been caught red handed spying on users. Amazon has been listening in to private conversations. NO. Never. Fuck Them.

    I have some relatives with that damned Amazon bullshit, and they got rid of it once they saw the spying article. It was that, and others like me refusing to have conversations in the room until the red light was on. Which theoretically was enough. I demanded no power to the unit.

    Anytime I see one of those things, I will not speak in front of them.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:41PM

      by stretch611 (6199) on Saturday June 30 2018, @10:41PM (#700796)

      Don't forget about google mapping your wifi information... SSID and MAC address.

      All gathered "accidentally" from its cars used for mapping/streetview.

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:29PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:29PM (#701087) Homepage

      I'm curious, do you have any sources for your claim "Both Amazon and Facebook have been caught red handed spying on users"?

      The "news" about Alexa recording a conversation and sending it is because the device misinterpreted conversations as a command to send an email to a contact and recorded conversation to send as the email. The device responded as it normally would to a command, such as with lights and verbally announcing the action. There was no evidence in this "news" about Amazon surreptitiously recording and uploading any/all conversations.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:31AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:31AM (#700874) Journal

    1) Receive free spy gizmo
    2) Place in soundproof cabinet...
    3) ...along with an Annoy-o-tron or similar device
    4) There is no step 4
    5) Google's AI becomes a fancy, multi-billion-dollar dubstep generator

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:41AM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:41AM (#700880)

    The audio on the mini is pretty tinny; the regular Google Home speaker is decent for music. I'd prefer a ceiling mount, to make it easier to see the lights indicating that it's processing your audio and to make it harder to block the microphone.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @12:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @12:58PM (#700952)

      I would probably fall in the target market for one of these things. I do not really have an interest in it. If you give me one for free. I would probably plug it in out of curiosity for a few days. Then un-plug it and then dump it in my large pile of other useless electronics. It would become literal garbage in this household.

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