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> The folks whose light switches are never used or who are even getting them removed.

Eh, I know an anecdote isn't a statistic, but my experience with voice controls is so bad that I've mostly gotten rid of the "smart" parts and gone back to the light switches.

Back when we had Alexa, we'd say "Alexa, Küche aus" ("kitchen off") and it would reply "Ich kann nicht 'Küche' im Spotify finden" (worse, we didn't have Spotify).

Siri is less bad, but it still just randomly fails. I've had two devices in the same room try to respond to the same voice command, one succeeds and the other spins around for a bit and responds with a spoken generic error.

For the voice input keyboard, the error rate is much worse, bad enough that in my experience I might as well have typed one real word and let autosuggest write the remainder of whatever I was not-typing.




I find that easy to believe.

I have watched my friends with this kit demonstrate it to me, many times, and to me it seems clumsy and difficult and error-prone, as well as being expensive, vastly horribly insecure and not so much violating privacy as gang-raping it.

I do not understand why they like it or think it better.

The only friend I know with a valid use case is non-light-sensing blind. It's useful for him to just tell the room "turn the lights off" rather than hunt for the switch. Or ask if they're on.

(Yes he has lights. He's married with a kid.)




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