[xigency]

Being overheard isn't the only privacy concern. Most of these solutions offload the speech recognition and language parsing functions to corporate servers. I like texting with Siri but I'm not exactly keen on having Apple record everything. It also seems limiting in that I can't use voice commands without a network.

It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data that's needed, but there's some convenience afforded.

[josh2600]

I think the processing requirements for handling on-device Siri would destroy battery life.

[gervase]

This actually doesn't seem to be the case. Take a look at Google Translate's offline voice recognition AND translation - it's really amazing, considering it's all happening on your device.

[SapphireSun]

I forget where it was, but they published something about training a very small very fast neural network that could fit comfortably in the phone's memory. Tricky tricky. :D

[euyyn]

Plus the only way to train these things at scale is to upload the recordings once you have some usage.

[kalleboo]

Worse for battery life than firing up the radio?

[awqrre]

And devices that listen to you 100% of the time is yet another privacy concern... even if they don't send everything to a remote server.

[qznc]

If you have a human assistant who does that job, he also listens 100% of the time.

[flavor8]

But he or she is less vulnerable to being automatically hacked by a three letter agency, foreign government, and/or hacker gathering data for identity theft.

The privacy concern _isn't_ necessarily about having something to hide. It's about the consistent hacking of major systems, and exposure of personal data.

[kbutler]

And you don't think there are privacy concerns with that? It is a /very/ intimate relationship, and generally requires some ritualized/formalized interaction, and a very high degree of trust.