I do believe you’ve misunderstood me entirely.
Let me be clear, since you’re having such difficulty.
I think that people should inform themselves about technology rather than default to being distrustful of it. I think that if people are distrustful of a voice assistant from any company, it’s a bit hypocritical of them to casually embrace far more security-issue-prone tech while making a show out of avoiding something like an Echo.
You could make that experience even more intense.
In other words… “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” (Cardinal Richelieu [disputed - clearly there were no Alexas in those days!])
(ETA beaten to it by Wanderfound, later in the thread. Or earlier - depends on your POV.)
Not ALL. Not even close.
In order to be responsive and probably to reduce the load on Amazon/Apple’s servers (and perhaps also to avoid spooking customers who are not yet used to this alternate future in which nobody has any privacy from marketers) these systems do voice parsing locally all the time, listening specifically for one of the few wake words. Once they hear the wake word, then they send that bit of audio data to remote servers for analysis.
Confirmation of this from Amazon can be found in this Alexa Blog entry that explains how to use an experimental feature that will send the wake word (once recognized) along with the rest of the audio that would normally be sent to the remote server for an additional non-local pass of wake word recognition to cut out false positives.
Couldn’t help but notice the giant Google Home mini ad at the top of this post. :::sigh:::
Something else I saw this morning in the news. Apparently, google gives their assistant for free in some shops in France. You need to buy other things, the assistant is a freebie.
Maybe more people than we think realise that they don’t want a device which sole purpose is to get you to be captive of google for your shopping? A device which stated purpose is to get you to buy things you never needed?
You get one for free as well if you buy a second generation Pixel device, AFAIK nearly globally.
This has nothing to do with market acceptance, I think. Google is just fighting of Amazon. The echo/Alexa “ecosystem”* has the big advantage for many people (in the US, at least, where mail-order of groceries seems to take off) to be actually useful. Shopping through Google, OTH, is not really an option, AFAIK.
That is what the article said: google is fighting Amazon. That certainly is part of the problem, but if the devices sold google would sell them and not give them. Even with Amazon in the equation.
Mail-order groceries have existed for years, even in Europe which is not as advanced as the USA in online retail. They never really took off.
Part of the problem maybe that one needs to be at home to take deliveries. Some French firms solved that problem in the following manner: you order online, your groceries can be picked up at a drive-in counter at the store. Of course, that is only pratical for shoppers who commute by car, a diminishing segment. And it is expensive for the shops.
Furthermore mail order of groceries via a voice assistant is not really more convenient than a web site. It is easier to be presented with images and see what is available.
What used to be a quiet backstage business drama is becoming more and more up front. Right now, Amazon is massively discounting their new Echo Show, the ‘video’ version of the Echo that was meant to call up videos for you the same way that the Echo calls up music. Except that Google keeps forcing them to disable the YouTube player on it, just to be dicks, basically.
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