1. Google and Amazon are pushing these with stupendous discounts, certainly below cost. That tells me that the revenue model is not the hardware. They hope to make money by manipulating me after I buy it. Nope.
2. Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information. Nope.
3. Google Home was found to be listening all the time due to a "hardware flaw." Nope.
4. Amazon devices doing the creepy laugh for no reason? Nope. I mean, come ON.
They couldn't pay me to incorporate one of these things into my living space. It's below-cost hardware running bigcorp-controlled, remotely updatable software intended to extract my info and dollars. Get lost!
2: can you source that please? Only time I ever heard of that was when people thought the bit about a movie coming out was an ad. They said it wasn't a paid thing and was given to people that they thought would enjoy the movie. Personally that's what I want to hear when I ask my home about my day. A reminder that a movie I am interested in is coming out today? Thanks for the reminder!
3: if your referring to the mini that a journalist got and found to be constantly recording small snippets of audio, I thought Google handled that really well. They had someone at his house to collect it the same day I think, and within days disabled the feature across the board even though only a small number of devices had the flaw.
1. Yes, I meant the Beauty and the Beast ad. They describe how "it invites our partners to be our guest and shares their tales." That's their actual explanation: this product is how Google invites THEIR guests into YOUR home. If that's honestly what you want, by all means. But not in my house.
2. Right, Home was found to be recording thousands of times a day. Google quickly shipped a software update to disable it: that's the right damage control, and they deserve credit for that response.
But the point is that Google will happily "spy on everything I said" and not notice. Why should a random reporter have to dig through Google codenames to discover this spying? Shouldn't Google have safeguards in place? And see their pathetic response [1] that doesn't acknowledge the true problem at all.
Google could own these mistakes. But instead they deny their ads are ads, and characterize constant eavesdropping as "touch controls behaving incorrectly." They haven't learned a thing, and until they do, this stuff is going to happen again and again with their products.
I'm sorry but you're either being intentionally obtuse or trying to twist and mislead people by spreading stories out of context and lacking crucial information.
1. In over two years the Home existing, that happened a SINGLE time, no money changed hands and once they realize it people didn't enjoy the experience, it never happened again.
Reading your original comment
> Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information
you make it sounds like this is something they do regularly all the time. It literally happened once a year ago and they apologized for it.
2. This was a hardware defect on a very very small number of units on a single type of smart speaker. The defect triggered the button at the top, which makes the speaker lights up, listen and tries to respond, so the user would clearly see it misbehaving. All recordings also show up on your activity page.
Again here, your original comment:
> Google Home was found to be listening all the time
You make it sound like his happened on all devices, was doing it intentionally and was doing it in an undisclosed secret way, when in fact it was a bug which realistically affected less than 0.00001% of the people and was fixed within a few hours once reported.
You can bend the truth and assume whatever crazy tinfoil theory you want, but that doesn't make it reality.
No if your using freely broadcast info to help with geolocation harvesting it all on the vehicle and processing to extract the info you want centrally is the optimal way to do it.
If Google promised to not inject more ads into My Day, I'd give them a break. But they did the opposite, committing to "continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users."
Regarding unexpectedly recording users: even if only one user was affected, the issue is that Google didn't show contrition. They characterized the problem as "touch controls behaving incorrectly" and did not acknowledge the privacy violation, except indirectly.
There's no conspiracy required here, the logic is very simple. Google is not losing money on these devices for fun.
How is literally driving to the house of the person affected 30m after receiving the email and replacing the broken device "not showing remorse"? I honestly don't understand HN sometimes, do you want them to literally lie about what happened? It was a hardware bug, and they literally had to cripple the device and disable touch control for every single device out there, to avoid this happening again, even though realistically it was only 0.001% of the devices that were affected. But again, they didn't take a chance and completely disabled that feature. Yet apparently that's "not shownig any remorse"...
As for ads, again, who cares what they said, actions is what matters. There hasn't been any other content like that since then.
1. This doesn't mean it will never happen again, or in other contexts (not "My Day").
2. Google still has the capacity to do it, and sure, this was a mistake, but just like Android records people's location by default, in the future google could decide for an opt-out feature that records for the sake of training ML, analytics, or some feature.
This is not about tinfoil conspiracies, this is simply caring about privacy. The vast majority of people in the US weren't directly affected by the NSA's espionage, but still there was public outcry because people like privacy.
If this guy/girl thinks it's better to be safe than sorry, let her/him do so. No need to get so defensive of Google.
EDIT: A downvote? I'm curious as to why (especially given there was no reply).
Sure, a lot of things /could/ happen, but my issue in particular was that the original comment was (intentionally or not) misleading people to believe something that was very far from reality.
As it is, they don't have ads and they don't record without consent. You could argue all day about what they could or would do in the future, but I will reconsider my decision to use he device then. Let's get the facts about how the product works now straight for now.
1) the current state of affairs is good enough coming from anyone in the BigCorp top10, particularily those already involved un data collection as core business?
2) future iterations on any of [hardware, software, business goals] will be conform to currently reasonable expectation of use from the general public ?
I mean we're talking about a corp that has internalised "Bait and Switch" as core business model..
the person you're responding to appears to be a google employee who regularly comments pro-google statements in these type of threads, trying to paint google in a positive light.
This is newspeak. I am going to go up to someone in the street, put my hand in their pocket and when they don't enjoy the experience, I'll act all apologetic and surprised, kind of sad that they didn't enjoy the experience, but of course respecting their wishes and I would totally not try something similar in the future (except maybe their other pocket?) because I'm not at all a bad citizen just looking out for the shareholders ok?
And we are just now starting to figure out that those people were way smarter than those of us who bought into smartphones. Hence even Google pushing the whole "well being" thing this year at I/O. (I've had a smartphone since 2009, but am strongly considering something dumber next time around.)
The corollary of being privacy conscious is NOT being stupid. Folks may be privacy conscious and all power to them to navigate the web/mobile world by making respective choices. However, A LOT of folks are perfectly fine trading off their privacy with convenience and value-add that comes with sharing data with companies (that use the said data to provide better and customized experiences to them). Categorizing people who make these trade offs as less smart is missing the point - and probably cynical since you can't accept them.
One would argue that it’s only because they’ve nothing to lose at the time. I imagine sometimes all the smart motivated people who would never ever run for office or be a public figure of any sort because they’re afraid of their search or post history of their teens or 20s cropping up. I’ll bet it’s actually quite a massive amount. I’m certainly in that boat.
I don't feel dumber. I traded information to Google in exchange for convenience. Now maybe that wasn't worth it to you, but I'd avoid speaking for all of us. My smart phone makes me a functional member of society, that's worth a bit of privacy.
I can never go back to not having the worlds map/navigation in the palm of my hand. I would love to go back to a dumb phone if not for the very crucial feature for me.
What if you could have that convenience without trading information? Weather, stock prices, recipes, music, traffic, timers, shopping lists, etc. don't require sharing any of your personal information.
I'm interested in how you think weather or traffic (for example) would work. Would you download all weather and traffic for every location/road on earth? That's quite a lot of data.
Only if we allow ad tech biz to dictate the definition of "functional member." So far they are winning. At one point my mom yelled at me for never checking Facebook, she genuinely thought I was being rude.
This a war of attrition. FOMO is powerful and most people eventually give in. The companies co-opt your friends and family against you. They don't even realize what is happening.
Would you prefer it if it gp had instead said "My computer makes me a functional member of society"?
For many people, the only computer they have is the smart phone, it's how they look for (and apply for jobs), do some banking, check emails and keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues.
I know it's less convenient, but there's dedicated WiFi hotspot devices that exist.
I considered getting a "dumb phone" and one of these devices because in some cases a tablet-style internet-only plan + pay-as-you-go minutes for the odd time I use a phone would be cheaper than a bundled smartphone plan.
At this point saving the $10/month isn't worth the hassle to me though and now I use Slack on my phone so damn much it'd never work :\
Look at the new Nokia 'matrix phone' 8110. It is a dumb phone with some smart features and most notably 4G and WiFi hotspot functionality. At only 80 dollars or so. I am seriously considering getting one just as an experiment
Not at all, those things are mutually exclusive. You can have a device that is useful and makes many facets of your life much better, but is also hurting other parts. You can still keep the former, and try to reduce the impacts of the latter.
If smartphones were completely useless, then we wouldn't actually need well-being features, we would just throw away our phones...
I'm going to keep blatantly promoting the Librem 5 [1], which is designed specifically to address these concerns (not affiliated with them, just a fan).
I'd be careful about promoting vapor as people tend to get annoyed when they don't get their product. If Purism ships, I doubt it will be anything decent. They are absurdly under capitalized for what they are trying to do. I'd love to be wrong but I'd happily bet 5 figs that I'm not.
Why do you say they're "absurdly" under-capitalized? They already make laptops. The phone's hardware seems fairly standard, no risky R&D gambles, and the software is Linux/OSS...
They re-badge laptops that someone else makes. It's not like they have their own factory in China. In this case they are not re-badging, they are building their own phone and phones are considerably harder to make. There are QA processes that require machines that cost >$1M. It puts them into a situation where they have to trust their manufacturer 100% and pray.
Essential spent ~$100M making their phone and they had help from Foxconn and awesome industry connections. $2M isn't gonna cut it.
Why not Android without the Google services, e.g. LineageOS or CopperheadOS? IMO, for the category it targets -- devices for users that have neither the skill nor desire to be their own sysadmin -- Android is technically superior to the usual GNU/Linux stack. GNU/Linux is moving in the right direction with sandboxed Flatpak apps, but Android is already there. Also, Android is a thoroughly mainstream platform. So if you don't want to be a free-software purist, you can run individual proprietary apps, as long as they're available outside the Play Store and don't require Google services. With a GNU/Linux system, unless it can run Android inside a container, you're basically limited to web applications for anything mainstream.
Android is thoroughly insecure, and proprietary apps do not generally work without Google services. Google has successfully convinced, for example, nearly all apps using location, to use Play Location Services instead of Android Location API. Apps tend to just crash out without Play Services.
Even Microsoft, which is Google's direct competitor for all of these services, hilariously depends on Play Services for nearly all of their Android apps. Office, Skype, etc. all will not run on an Android phone without Google.
I have a Windows Mobile phone these days, and for all the jokes about it being dead: I actually have a wider app selection than AOSP users. Android is a proprietary OS, and almost none of it's apps today are compatible with the open source version.
There's always the Amazon Appstore. And with an open-source Android variant, you could restrict apps that demand over-reaching permissions, including the Amazon Appstore itself.
The Amazon Appstore is trash, and many of the apps in it are out of date or outright nonfunctional. When I tried using Skype on my old Android phone, and it required Play Services, I was mystified because it was also available on Amazon.
As it turned out, the Amazon Appstore version was so out of date it just didn't work anymore.
Go ahead and be an unpaid data gathering tool that can be used by bigcorps, those with the right exploit or (even if they don't do now) when ToS changes and that company starts selling your information to the highest bidder.
They profit at your ignorance.
The fact that it will execute commands with your recorded voice should tell you there's a lot of exploits that can happen without your intervention.
If I want a device to start listening I'll go and push a button for it. The always listening stuff is way too big an vulnerability (like an unsecured API into your house).
I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.
> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.
I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.
Your Facebook data, annually, is worth about $12. Your Google data is probably not worth much more.
Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.
Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.
And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.
Corporations do operate primarily based on profits (not entirely, but mostly).
You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.
Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.
It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.
Anyone who believes the American drone program is not unethical has a seriously skewed moral compass, and I would not trust to be in the same room with.
Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.
Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.
First of all, people haven't even come to a consensus on when war itself is ethically justified. It shouldn't surprise anyone that drone warfare, a subset of something we can't come to an ethical consensus on, is a highly debated ethical issue.
It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.
I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.
edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.
You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.
Your first source states in the headline that the drone strikes "kill innocents 90% of the time".
Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".
An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.
Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.
Which is frustrating, I wouldn't blink at paying that much for Facebook if it meant a genuine ad and tracking free experience. I want to be your customer, not your product.
IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.
I exist, and I also need email. Seems like a win-win for me and google. Realistically, what are you afraid of? Like I said if someone wanted to listen to me it would be very boring.
This is why Google's pushing HTTPS Everywhere so hard, just like net neutrality: It eliminates Google's competition in collecting and monetizing data about your viewing.
Google will claim that they make these moves because they care about your privacy, security, and freedom, but malicious tracking scripts they don't do anything about, because that would close off their own profit scheme.
Which competitors will be excluded by the increase in HTTPS? Which companies exactly are relying on the connections being unencrypted, and how are they able to monitor them?
And if Google's competitors are spying on HTTP rather than using tracking scripts, why does seemingly every page I visit load tracking scripts from a bunch of companies?
ISPs. HTTPS Everywhere and net neutrality laws are both endeavors designed to mitigate ISPs from providing ad networks and/or collecting data on Internet usage.
Of course, Google claims they do this for your benefit, but if it was for your benefit, they'd need to stop doing the same things with tracking scripts. This is how you can tell they are pushing these to reduce competition, not to increase your privacy.
In one of the major announcements for Chrome, 'Moving towards a more secure web' (2016-09-08) [1], the Chrome Security Team writes:
"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."
The word 'modify' is a hyperlink to an article titled 'AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection' [2] (ironically, a non-HTTPS site).
This statement both ignores the tremendous effect smartphones have on you personally (as opposed to others being interested in you), and the tremendous effect tech platforms have on large scale groups of unimportant people.
Oh no doubt, and it does so intentionally. A voice assistant in my house effects me and only me. Therefore, I am ok with the privacy/convenience tradeoff because frankly IDK what Google thinks they know about me, but I google way too much random crap to ever put together a half-way decent profile about me and my interests.
Maybe, but HFT have been working a long time to find a pattern in the markets. Human's are random and Sampling can only tell you so much especially when sampling bias is so easy to do accidentally
Humans can be spontaneous yes, but not exactly random. In aggregate, human behavior from online activities is predictable [0] according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies.
To Quote the link you just posted, "Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings. How can you know that you have corrected for every possible factor? Thirdly and finally, the "science" part of "data science" still lacks rigor in my opinion. For instance, a lot of the conclusions the book talks about are based on single studies which don't seem to be repeated. In some cases the sample sizes are large, but in other cases they are small. Plus, people's opinions can change over time, so it's important to pick the right time window in which to do the study. All this points to great responsibility on the part of data scientists to make sure that their results are rigorous and not too simplistic, before they are taken up by both politicians and the general public as blunt instruments to change social policies. This responsibility increases especially as these approaches become more widespread and cheaper to use, especially in the hands of non-specialists. When you are in possession of a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail." - Thank you for making my point for me.
You are not necessarily disagreeing with what I wrote about correlation, that humans are predictable in aggregate, which is the opposite of your point that humans are random (in aggregate).
The text you quoted is disagreeing with the author with respect to the use of correlations to explain causality, which we both know will lead nowhere if all confounding variables are not properly accounted for; something which is infeasible to do in the real world.
"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.[1] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man." - Wikipedia.
We don't know anything about how the parent poster uses his smartphone, if he has one.
This is a false equivalence; There is a slight difference between owning a smartphone with privacy and data collection management options and actively bringing into your home a device designed and acknowledged to constantly record and transmit data.
They aren't designed to constantly record or transmit. If they were sending that kind of info out the WAN connection, it would be noticed the day it's enabled.
If you trust Google to honor the privacy and data collection management options, then I see no reason not to apply that same level of trust to their home speaker product.
Now, whether these devices are capable of doing this on a targeted basis, that's possible. That same possibility exists with the closed source baseband chip in all our smartphones as well, though.
It was an experience that happened a single time a year ago. No money exchanged hands, it was just a fun thing they made for fan of the movie, and after the criticism, they apologized and never did it again.
Yes the parent comment makes it sound like this is something that happened all the time... I'm not sure why a comment literally spreading lies is the top comment, I guess HN loves crazy tinfoil hat alternative truth now.
Similarly with #3, it was a hardware bug that impacted a very very small number of devices, and which was fixed within hours of being reported. It was also very obvious the device was misbehaving so implying that Google was "spying" is stupid. Why would Google make the device light up and make noises if they were spying on you?
Ignoring the misleading/obtuse information here and focusing on the "hell nah" declaration:
Nobody is forcing you to use any of those smart speaker devices, and nobody is forcing you to buy them.
Many people really enjoy using their Google Home or an Amazon Echo, as it greatly improves aspects of their day-to-day life.
Some people with disabilities are actually greatly alleviate by this progress - they can now use their voice to control many different things within their house which was not possible before.
There are plenty of good use cases for these, and I'm sure there are legitimate ways people can decide they're happy with the trade-off.
However, for me this screams of a Facebook style scandal coming sooner or later. People buying these things often don't really know what the business model is behind this, and don't know really know how Amazon/Google is going to make money. We can all sit here and speculate about it as informed people, but that's not the general market. I could easily see in 2 years time people turning around and saying "What do you MEAN Amazon has been ordering more expensive versions of products when I use the Echo" or "What do you mean Google showed me adverts for Ron Paul because I keep asking it about chem trails".
The power of the information collected by these devices is incredibly far reaching, and incredibly profitable, and at the moment most people aren't really capable of giving informed consent.
People are giving you a lot of shit for this, but I agree. #1 was enough to swing it for me.
Unfortunately, my room mate bought two of them anyway, and so I've spent the last 6 months unplugging one of them every time I go to the bathroom.
By the way, they also aggressively throw multicast traffic around your network and upload at least 10 megabytes an hour to google even when idle.
My current speculation is that they are tracking android and possibly non-android devices as they move from network to network so they can better map who knows who.
Your first point reminds me of a recent podcast[1] where Tren Griffin said that sometimes the hardware is simply a distribution channel for the software, which is where all the margins are. He called this "software in a box."
This has been common for years now in the IoT sphere, and begins to infect everything in computing too.
To be honest, I just fucking hate it. When companies turn a product into a service, they can afford selling entry package at a loss, thus driving out competitors who sell products as products. Suddenly, you have yet another thing for which you need recurring payments (instead of one-time), and which will only work as long as the provider likes it. You lose freedom and control.
What is great is you get to chose. We have several Google homes in our house and they are used daily by my family.
Saved my butt two days ago. Son graduation was at an arena in the city and walking by the GH and asked drive time to find over 2x than normal.
Apparently a MLB baseball game that started 15 minutes after his graduation start time.
Usually traffic is out of the city not in. Thanks to Google made it in time. What is also cool is the arena name is a hard name to pronounce as named after someone who gave money to the University yet Google still got it on first try. Alexa and Siri can't handle such things.
But have zero problem with you not wanting one as it is a personal choice.
1. -> Not necessarily, they might just be trying to dominate the market, or just make such devices popular, then increase prices. However, it's probably about data gathering (and having an ad platform in-house) too.
In my experience, Google Home is way better than Alexa. The voice recognition ability on Google Home (like my Android phone) is top notch and its integration with YouTube Music is awesome. I can ask it to play regional language songs and because it knows my YouTube History, it simply works. Also, I use Android Auto and am able to take Google Assistant seamlessly there too including the ability to play any music on demand by just instructing Google Assistant. It really is magical. I don't know how Amazon can even compete in this.
Alexa: tells me I have a weekday alarm set for 5:30 AM
Me: "Alexa, set the bedroom temperature to 75 degrees"
Alexa: sets the temp to 75 degrees in the bedroom
Me: "Alexa, turn on the great room"
Alexa: turns on the great room lights
Me: "Alexa, turn off the office light"
Alexa: turns off my study lights
Me: "Alexa, turn on the whole house"
Alexa: turns turns on every light in the house
Skill integrations include: Harmony, Lutron, etc. YYMV. But we have one Alexa device in every room (8 devices total) and our biggest issue is waking her up when talking "about" her.
These all seem like table stakes. My Home can do all of these, but I just have to say "hey Google, turn on CNN" instead of the awkward "tell harmony" thing.
I find Amazon gets my voice significantly better than my GH, but I agree with you otherwise. I find the GH is much more useful, the Alexa doesn't seem capable of doing anything significant for me and it sits there never been talked to by anyone in the house.
It doesn't hurt that Google is practically giving them away.
The Home Mini has been $20 several times (inc. black Friday), $80 for three at Costco, or nearly free (e.g. spend $125 on Google Express right now and get one included). I paid only $64 for my Google Home for example (new from eBay).
My point is, if you follow deal sites Google has had back to back sales almost since they launched. The $50/$130 prices for the Mini/Home respectively are largely fiction.
Nothing wrong with sacrificing short term profit to meet a longer term objective.
So yes, it doesn't hurt. In fact, it quite clearly helps a ton.
Does that make them pound for pound competitive with one another? No of course not. But consumers are not necessarily buying one or the other on a price basis. Alexa got there earlier. Google has to do something to overcome that hurdle.. being practically free or getting stuffed into something else for free is a successful way to overcome.
But there’s no point in giving them away for free unless future value can be extracted from those devices. It’s not a service like Spotify where you’ll get a month free to demo/“get hooked” then start paying the a subscription fee. Maybe the value for Google is word of mouth advertising? Data collection to improve future versions?
That's exactly what they are. How well can you access your music library from the platform? Control your lights? Ask about the state of your car? Your thermostat? Your shopping account at Amazon? Access to the Google knowledge graph? Your Gmail inbox, with the inferred fight information and calendar data?
Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.
They are just a lot less work (the platform provider does the bulk of it) so it's not that hard for third parties to support a couple of competing platforms. The barrier part is much less barrier-y than, say, desktop apps or smartphone apps. The space is also smaller and more constrained - nobody is going to invent an 'integration' as popular as, say, a snapchat.
For now most apps are pretty simple, but with better conversation skills (comprehension, keeping context, etc), developers might write some pretty advanced ones. And if one platform has infrastructure that can offload that and convert it into simple APIs, I can see it being a stronger lock-in than smartphone apps.
Agreed. Let's remember how simple apps used to be in the first home computers. $5 on a single floppy, mostly to convert duplication costs. As the market developed, they got more sophisticated and became a larger moat.
I think it'd be hard for anyone to remember that since it didn't really happen. Gates was complaining people were pirating his $75 BASIC pretty much right off the bat, for instance.
Walmart competes with Mom and Pop grocery stores. Google is competing with god damn Amazon. And possibly future startups that might otherwise try to enter the smart speaker space, but decide not to because they can't compete at that price point. In which case, great...that is not a case of a large corporation leveraging their size/position to harm customers.
I think you could argue Walmart was primarily competing with mom and pop stores a decade ago (though really other large supermarkets at that point), but they are most certainly competing with amazon today.
How can preventing competition be great? If innovative startups are prevented from entering the market because of predatory pricing, it does harm customers.
The Apple Homepod puts it at a premium price with a digital assistant that people aren't really happy with. The Google Assitant wants people to buy it at cost or less. I think that Apple can have an assistant that will eventually be as good as Alexa / Google and then they would have a great speaker with a great digital assistant. Since I own Alexa's (and I developed an app on the platform) I don't see why I would buy a Google Assistant but I could see myself getting an Apple Homepod.
Don't forget Google has a competitor for the Homepod too, the Home Max. I'm a bit skeptical that either device will be especially successful, despite the fact that they have had positive reviews. Their price makes them a significantly more niche, and they have stiff competition from companies that are already established in that market segment (e.g. Sonos).
Interestingly Amazon seems to be staying out of that end. I wonder if they are waiting it out - Echo was kind of a surprise success originally after all.
Yeah we have two Mini’s at home that came for free with different purchases. Same thing with a friend of mine. I would think that accounts for a good portion of them.
This is just personal experience. I have both google home and alexa (plus a dot). My observation for my use:
1. Google responds more to my command with slightly (not much) more natural tones;
2. Google recipe for cooking (I tried only once) is tremendously more helpful with waits and timers automatically added on;
3. Alexa has better sound for music although I only listen for working background not for serious music listening;
4. If you ask Google to say hi to Alexa it does whilst Alexa would say a long blurb about your contact skill is not available blah blah. But she responds to Google's greetings;
5. Calling "Alexa" is just easier than calling two words "hey google";
6. When Alexa skills work, they are awesome but it really is annoying to remember all the cues for skill names which i don't.
Overall, they are both very limited still. Right now I use Google a little bit more. It probably also helps that Google knows everything about me given I work in front computers all day but not so much with Amazon.
Google seems to be very aggressively pushing Google Home Mini devices lately. eBay just ran a promo where you get one for free with $150 purchase site-wide, and Google Shopping Express is running something similar with a lower $125 purchase requirement.
Does Google have too many inventories on hand, or do they really, really want people to put one in their homes no matter what the cost?
Voice interfaces are likely to be a big part of our future, and in order to have the best voice ML tech, you need a ton of real-world data. I wouldn’t be overly surprised to see them pay people to have/use these things.
I agree on the land grab. But for data, powers of ten are what we're talking about. Accents, regional phrasing, idioms, and mixing different languages together.
The models are moderately good at basic speech to text and some grammatical parsing. But there is a lot more to go. The simplicity of the command set isn't an indicator of their aspirations. You'd eventually want a system capable of understanding any utterance by any human, at least as good as any other human. And certainly not just in command syntax.
Maybe it's just the mid-level clothing retailer model? The MSRP is priced higher but you can almost always get it on "sale" so you think you're getting a good deal?
They're super commodity hardware -- tust a WiFi chip, a speaker, a mic, and some other off-the-shelf components. It seems like the profit margins would be high at full retail price. Remember that the tech companies don't care about recouping their R&D costs, they just want to get these things into homes essentially at cost. Economies of scale really kick into play when you're making millions.
You can get a vendor lock-in effect. "Google when's my flight?" data extracted from gmail. Although I don't think they make much money from gmail, so ??
I'm not sure why this was voted down, it's this the obvious goal of these devices? Get people to accept voice-control in the home? For now they are woken up by a wake word, but as people become more comfortable with them, this restriction is relaxed in the name of "convenience".
I have both, and I've found that the GH is better at figuring out what I'm trying to ask. It's a lot more flexible with freeform speech.
On the other hand, the Alexa devices have a lot more apps, and I think that's in part because it's so much easier to build apps for it, mainly because they have a lot of scaffolding in AWS for it. I've even built a few of my own.
Google's search expertise was meant to succeed in voice. That is just their forte, like Facebook's is social and Amazon's is commerce. I don't see how Google doesn't win voice in the long haul.
I've never really understood the US-centricity of most tech companies. Sure the US will always be the single biggest market but times are changing. With the rise of the middle class in the emerging economies and the global redistribution of wealth from the West to the rest, there are huge opportunities to leapfrog US-centric companies.
Apple is probably the best example of a company that realises the opportunity of building a supply chain that can satisfy the demand of their goods on a global level.
Nno other relatively homogenous market even comes close to US market size.
The EU is great, a lot of regulations have been standardised, but it's still a place with 24 different languages, twelve different currencies, different national systems (e.g. payment systems, shipping, retail outlets, marketing channels), culture etc. It's still very much a fragmented place. So the UK, France, Germany, Italy are still to a substantial extent separate markets, all of which are less than a quarter the size of the US.
Japan probably comes closest to the US.
Then there's China, it has the gdp, but not the gdp per capita. You can take $50 a day as a threshold for the type of targeted consumer class for example, that's about $18k a year. If you look at income distributions in China you'll find only about 10 million Chinese qualify. If you take a $20 a day / $7k a year figure, you get to about 100 million people. Japan is similar, around 100m. The US figure for this group is 300 million.
I mean don't get me wrong, you can't only have a US-focus. But I hardly see any companies do that. Instead they do first-launches in key markets and expand later on, and that makes sense.
It does but not where it matters. You want places that are willing to fork out big money for flagship phones. An example of this would be China vs India.
China is a better market to be in to maximise profitability as the Chinese are more likely to fork out USD 799 for a phone than the Indians. It's almost mind-boggling how one company can capture so much share of profits.
“Canalys analysts note that the rapid growth of smart speaker sales outside the U.S. and Google’s strength with channel partners helped it vault past Amazon. A news release on the study comments that, “Google’s success comes on the back of shipments into new markets, such as India,”
Both Google and Amazon are aggressively expanding overseas with their assistants. Amazon is putting the Echo in 80 countries:
Yep. Foreign certifications take time, and standards for manufacturing, communication/signal interference, and more vary, but not serving the world as quickly as possible is a bad plan for growth or community enthusiasm.
(Story time: As someone who had to find creative means to get SO many US-only goods into Canada, even ages after their US release, this is terrible with electronics. Shure headphones were the worst, where there was no Canadian distributor, so I ended up special-ordering through an audiology clinic.)
The whole reason I went Windows Phone > Android > iOS was because Microsoft took 17 months to get their latest Lumia phone to singapore. Despite the fact windows phone was used a lot in Asia. Microsoft killed themselves off by not being able to do what Apple can do with world wide release. Now I never see windows phones at all in Asia.
I don't own one, but I wish these speakers were smart enough to recognize their owner's voice. The number of podcasts I listen to where the hosts have banned saying "Alexa" and "Hey Google" is silly. They say it then apologize, or use Echo or say Hey G instead. It seems like something of a security flaw to me, as if websites had to avoid having "rm" on them in case it triggered file removal.
They can both recognize your voice. Not sure about the Echo, but the Google Home doesn't do anything even remotely sensitive unless it recognizes your voice, but it will do things that don't require auth, e.g. answering questions, playing music etc. I don't know what the false reject rates are, but they're non-zero, and failing to respond to the weather because they weren't sure it was you seems like a bad trade-off for most people.
Google home does, it actually applies some amount of security using voice recognition. you can see it in action if you use a Harmony Hub. my voice has access to control my electronics but my guests can't
The integration of the always on Assistant on the phone and on the speakers is a powerful combination. Sort of weird it is not integrated into Chome on desktop.
I find the opposite. There's nothing more infuriating when I "hey google" my phone for something that Home can't handle but my phone says "answering on another device" and then the Home says "I don't know how to help you with that". My Home has probably recorded a lot of swearing after those events.
In my expierence if you care at all about smart-home controls, or if you’re a frequent user of Amazon Prime, Amazon’s Alexa platform is the best option for your home.
I prefer the Echo, over the Google Home for its depth of capabilities, wide smart-home device support, ability to play the most popular music streaming services, and slightly superior sound quality.
In addition to its built-in features, the Alexa platform includes a growing list (more than 15,000 at last count) of “Skills,” akin to apps on a smartphone, that unlock capabilities such as reading recipes, ordering pizza, or calling an Uber. Not all of its Skills are useful, but the Echo still does far more than the Google Home does.
The Echo is not the all-capable computer from Star Trek, but it is a smart digital assistant that’s constantly improving as Amazon adds more abilities to it.
I wonder if there are any google/amazon marketing people on this thread.
Anyway, you do think it's fine to put a device that -on a bit-flip- is able to record and analyze anything you say and inject ads to your daily routine anywhere and this bit-flip can be done anytime because it is connected and updated through the internet without any interaction. We should trust the makers because reasons. What can go wrong, right?
And all this privacy breach is justified for the convinience of not getting up from the sofa to order a pizza.
Yeah phones are essentially the same stuff. And it's definetly not OK and scary to not be able to trust a device you (have to) use daily.
> I’d argue that people tell google far far more confidential information via search than they ever will say out loud.
This last point made me somehow reconsider my stance. The profiles already built up by search queries and gmails are probably more accurate already than it will ever be with GH, it will be just another few datapoints to more accurately describe a random person. But I still think it's inane to put another channel in our daily lives by these devices.
> I can't believe people have different values from me.
I don't find it all that unbelievable. Convenience is a hell of a drug, and the practical negative impact on someone's life from this kind of service is...what exactly?
Yep, those are scary too. But with phones I can instantly connect to anyone on the planet and make photos and write up stuff I would otherwise forget and browse the largest human knowledge bases on the planet.
For this I have to give in a lot of my privacy and hope that I can trust the device/software manufacturers - meanwhile prevent what I can.
What does google home or amazon echo brings to my life that is so ground breaking that I need another data-gathering device? I may come off as ignorant because I probably am. But I'll reconsider if somebody seriously can tell me how vastly these devices improved their life.
Just like cellphones, it adds convenience to one's life. I can ask it to play an album or my favorite news while cooking or driving without having to stop what I'm doing to deal with a small graphical interface.
The killer feature for me is being able to add stuff to our family grocery list. It's so much better than opening an app, swiping around and typing on a tiny keyboard.
Once you get used to doing things via voice it's hard to go back.
I hope like hell that snips succeeds. This IoT stuff really needs to be open source. I don't want to fill my home with sensors that I don't control, and I'm technical enough to deploy some home brew stuff, but there's just not a whole lot out there as far as open source smart devices
edit: Can anyone name some other privacy respecting, non-cloud, open source platforms and devices to work with?
To somewhat answer my own question, snips has a pretty active community which should hopefully be a good entree into the ecosystem of privacy-friendly hardware projects
(discord, twitter, and https://github.com/snipsco/awesome-snips#community-projects)
I am in India (very limited service e.g. we don't have Spotify or Youtube music.) and own both, however, I (and all my family members) find Home Mini not able to wake with even loudest "Ok, Google", "Hey, Google" from a distance when it is already playing something which Echo Dot flawlessly does. Also I am not able to play any station from TuneIn in Google Home Mini (Support has no clue)
Why does it matter which surveillance capitalist "wins"? It's us who will lose in the end.
Amazon is now selling that data and surveillance technology to law enforcement, and Google to the military. I don't feel good about any of them "winning" in this market.
> Amazon is now selling that data and surveillance technology to law enforcement, and Google to the military. I don't feel good about any of them "winning" in this market.
I wont ever consider getting a smart speaker unless, at a minimum, it did all of its voice processing locally and emitted an audit-able series of search queries.
At least half the use-cases for these things don't even need an internet connection, IMHO. Another significant chunk could be serviced by push-only data feeds and device-local search.
My father 88 years old is very conservative and anti-technical, he even doesn't use mobile phone, never got on the internet or e-mail (unlike my Mom).
After seeing my Google Home Mini demonstration his reaction was - Can I also get one?
Well he isn't able to use a computer or even complicated mobile phone. And now he has a bad sight and his hands are shaking.
So the ability to talk to device, to get on the internet, to get weather forecast, news, music he likes (he obviously doesn't like modern music), get some videos from YouTube on TV screen or call someone is a revelation. Plus the fact that it just works and is really cheap.
Canalys are a well known google Shill. When the apple hit record revenues in China Canalys pretty much ignored them in their market report. A quick google shows that they are hardly unbiased or particularly accurate in their reporting
Umm, read further through his comments. Most of them are blatant lies about Apple/Microsoft/Amazon. He’s the closest to a paid Google shill that I’ve seen on HN
I am old and historically been a fan of Apple more than any other company of the past. Well besides DEC. Huge, huge, huge fan of DEC in the day. Never been a fan of Microsoft as felt they never strive to be the best and historically have provided a poor user experience compared to Apple.
But also MS just never seemed to care much about security and that really bothered me. Felt they had a responsibility with being the biggest tech company and dominated desktops. Took Google to do ChromeOS and that is wrong, IMO.
But today I am more of a fan of Amazon and Google more than any other company. I still use a lot of Apple hardware but I am very frustrated that they just lost their way on being the best and more importantly on user experience.
I am very into technology and more than anything the user experience. I love the interactions of humans and technology and this being the best it can be.
IMO, the best example we have to date is the Google search text box. That same text box is used by a rocket scientist, grandma, 7 year old kid, brain surgeon and everyone else in between.
That is the holy grail of UX. You type what you want and Google uses the computer to do all the work and you get your result. Quickly and accurately. Just that makes me a huge fan of Google. I can not think of any example in all of the history of computers that is close to what Google did?
But then the other aspect is I am an engineer by training. Founded a couple of companies and therefore had to do a variety of jobs but to my core an engineer.
So I spend a lot of time reading papers. The stuff Google has shared is just off the charts and no company in history can touch Google engineering. Not even DEC. I would say even surpasses Bell Labs.
So many things. Map/reduce, GFS, Borg, TPU 1.0, Beyond Corp, Wavenet, and I can go on and on. It is just amazing the incredible engineering things that Google shares.
I am truly in awe. I am all about fairness. There is ZERO question that Google provides a much better user experience in the things that are important today. Compare Google Maps to Apple Maps.
Compare Google Assistant to Alexa or even bigger lead with Siri. This is where UX is at today.
Larry Page in the late 90s was asked about using AI to improve Google Search. He responded they are using search to improve AI. From that day I was a HUGE Google fan. Still an Apple fan at the time but that is where it started.
I am also a big fan of Amazon and continue to not be a fan of MS. MS and Oracle are probably the two tech companies I dislike the most today. In the past it was IBM when I was a big DEC fan. I worked in VMS internals and was doing clustering internals like what is done today literally 30 years ago!
The other aspect that bothers me is the privacy one with Google and Apple. Apple privacy agreement is here.
"When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number."
That is crazy. Then when we look at China we have
"Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users"
The China gov tried to hack Gmail accounts and Google instead decided to leave China. These are the facts without emotions or marketing.
It does bother me you suggest I lie? I try to share a lot of links supporting my points. I do get things wrong from time to time but never have an intention of lying.
So if I post something that is factually incorrect then please call me on it and if possible share a link.
But do NOT confuse opinions with facts as happens so often. I am an engineer to my core and I therefore tend to be very unemotional and fact based.
No worries. I am old and started on the Internet in 1986. So use to it.
My only issue with negative Google posts is only to be fair. There is so many things today that are common place because of Google and their generosity in sharing their secrets.
Giving away basically Map/reduce and GFS and a big one is Borg and just so many other things. Plus all the open source.
That should be praised. Think a lot of the issues around Google of late are related to social politics. That is fine but should not bleed over into technology type things.
Someone has an issue in them firing Damore then say that but not that Google sucks at engineering or something like that.
Same with their business model primarily being ads. You might hate that which is fine but that does not mean they suck at engineering.
AWS's UX is better than GCP in most aspects. You should be transparent about the fact that you work for Google. They did not "give away" Map/Reduce, they simply published a paper but that paradigm had already been in use. iOS's security is miles ahead of Android. Have you tried installing a notepad app on android until recently? How many permissions have you had to give up?
Do not work at Google. But would be cool if I did. I am actually old and retired. Do not think they hire too many old people like me.
But do suspect I will eventually have kids that work there or hopefully. I have 8 kids and a couple very good at math. My wife's father was an engineer as I was trained as an engineer so not surprising.
My oldest has graduated CS but does not have the passion I had so works at a pretty sleepy enterprise doing Java. But my next son just finished his junior year and he is crazy smart. Also studying CS with an emphasis in AI. He has the ability and think the passion. Driving him home from University last week he was pretty beat up by his AI classes. Had to give a bit of a pep talk.
Yes Google shared a paper on Map/Reduce as well as GFS and so many other things. Those papers gave away their "secrets" on how they do things. Same with how they use containers and Borg to manage their workloads. There is so many others and could go on and on.
I have never seen a tech company give back as much as Google. I would love to debate it and use facts to compare if there is anyone else close? The Amazon Dynamo paper was a fantastic give back but that is still well short of what Google gave back.
Heck Amazon uses Android still to run almost all their hardware. Where Google gave Android away to everyone.
On Android and security. It is a very different thing to support a wide variety of hardware that is not in your control versus Apple controlling the entire stack. I personally have a Pixel 2 XL and feel confident it will be as secure as my iPhone which I also use but less and less. More to share location in iMessages with my kids when on holiday than anything else. My iPhone is more of an iMessage phone. Even have the kids off of facetime and now using Duo.
Another great example is the Google WiFi. We can see the recent router security hack that hit so many companies but if you have a Google WiFi you are pretty comfortable that you are safe from such attacks. Google just built in much better security than any other router I am aware of.
Then on desktop ChromeOS is really the most secure machine you can buy. Just take a look at how Google implemented GNU/Linux on the Pixel Book versus MS adding some GNU/Linux support.
The Google approach is far more secure. The GNU/Linux applications separated by containers and then the entire thing using the hardware sand boxing. That is a far more secure approach.
There was one other topic wanted to address with you. I listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of tech videos on YouTube. Plus went to Google I/O last year.
I am constantly amazed at the grace of Googlers. That should have been your first clue I was not a Googler.
They have every reason to be cocky but they are not. Either it is done in the hiring process or training or maybe both.
I would love if any googlers read this post if they would explain where it comes from?
From below link (from Mar 7), 47.3M U.S adults have access to a smart speaker. Or about 20% of all U.S. adults. Access meaning own or live with someone who owns one.
it's a land grab, doesn't matter if people actually bought them, it only matters how many of them are out there. one you have one you are more likely to buy for Google stuff. for example, the Chromecast works well with Google home but doesn't with Alexa.
1. Google and Amazon are pushing these with stupendous discounts, certainly below cost. That tells me that the revenue model is not the hardware. They hope to make money by manipulating me after I buy it. Nope.
2. Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information. Nope.
3. Google Home was found to be listening all the time due to a "hardware flaw." Nope.
4. Amazon devices doing the creepy laugh for no reason? Nope. I mean, come ON.
They couldn't pay me to incorporate one of these things into my living space. It's below-cost hardware running bigcorp-controlled, remotely updatable software intended to extract my info and dollars. Get lost!