The problem is that there’s really very little for them to do that wouldn’t cause us to radically reevaluate home computer security practice.
Consider the following commands:
- Make me a doctor’s appointment.
- Renew my plate with the DMV.
- Read my messages from Outlook.
- Make a bulk order of Salami from SalamiEmporium.net
- Call my wife/uncle/brother/in-law/mistress.
All of them require the service or device to retain vast quantities of personal data or infer them from your habits. Storing your kinship network to make the “call my uncle” command work is the first in a long list of things that a useful service would have to do (that it can do right now with technology we currently have) that require an overarching reliable security infrastructure not currently in place today. Ordering from 3rd party websites (Echo can only order from Amazon.) as long as they are relatively uniform or have a “voice-friendly” API is a useful ability that can easily be exploited by a website called SaramiEmporium.net.
I’m not saying these problems are insurmountable, but they probably will need to be surmounted before these things are truly useful.
