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I was given one for Christmas in 2019, and went back in the box by new year. Just couldn't see the point.

• postalrat 5y ago
  They make great alarm clocks, timers, etc. Maybe good for podcasts if that's your thing.
  • Syonyk 5y ago
    You know what makes a better alarm clock? An alarm clock that doesn't stand a pretty good chance of randomly broadcasting your bedroom audio to the internet on a regular basis. You can even get ones that work when the power's out! If you replace "assistant" with "internet connected room mic" when pondering them, I find it helps make the decisions far clearer. The best place for them is never having been shipped in the first place. The second best place is the trash. Down the list from there is "unplugged and forgotten." And somewhere at the bottom is "Powered on, connected, and waiting for a plausible excuse to broadcast fairly clear room audio out to the internet."
    • postalrat 5y ago
      Guess what, your phone can also start randomly broadcasting your bedroom audio to the internet. You could call a phone a "internet connected room mic" or "personal gps tracker". Does that stop you from using one?
      • Syonyk 5y ago
        Yes. At least, in some significant ways. I've abandoned smartphones for the time being (but have a PinePhone to hack on for sport and challenge - it in no way resembles a functional device at this point in time) and have gone back to a flip phone device with a removable battery that generally lives on the kitchen counter, and has a pretty poor room mic. It gets rebooted (full power cycle with battery removal) often enough, and I frequently don't bother bringing it with me places, or at least bringing it with powered on. I've found since I'm looking at it far less, it falls out of mind, so I will quite literally head into town and not realize I don't have it until I get nearly back home. It's fine, I did that for years before cell phones existed, I see no reason why I can't go back to that. "No phones in the bedroom" is just a standing good policy for a range of reasons anyway. However, I generally trust phones a bit more than I trust the "room mic" class of "assistant" devices. First, they're on battery, and widespread abuse will mean rapid battery drain and a warm phone. A phone, warm in the pocket, is cause for either turning your phone screen off, or alarm if it's already screen off and you don't know why it's warm. But they also have a less effective microphone. Most of the ones I've experimented with over the years won't pick up a normal conversational tone across the room with any accuracy - but you can walk into a room, query for an Alexa/Google/etc device, and the one across the room will generally respond to you. They have far better microphones than a typical phone does for room audio. I'm aware that the various devices are not supposed to be a live stream of room audio to the internet and generally don't seem to be doing that unless triggered, but the reports of people who have done a deep dive into their triggered captures have been that it captures a lot of nonsensical chunks of audio for no discernible reason beyond, presumably, "When in doubt, capture and send" - ease of use, of course, meaning that false negatives in detection are far more serious than false positives. But neither do I trust the companies involved to not be doing a range of audio analysis locally and sending the information up in random updates. I don't know that they do this sort of thing, but I don't trust them not to. You could do things like unique voice count in the room detection to identify how many people typically live in a place, or if people are having a party. You could do vocal stressor analysis to determine if people are frequently angry, upset, etc. And I'm sure there are many papers written on what else one can use this sort of stuff for. I object to the capability being present, even if not used. Hence my general trend of not keeping smartphones around me regularly - but even there, at least Apple devices do tend to indicate if something is abusing mic privileges, and I can remove audio privileges from apps. I can't do that with the... skills? whatever the audio helper additional functionality code is called.