[pen2l]

I know that this is a point that is raised a lot of times, but if we think about it ---

isn't cloud connectivity almost a necessity for things to work as well as they do?

Particularly, Google's game is machine learning... it cannot do it if it doesn't have the data that it does (e.g. Google Now won't be able to connect the dots between my buying a hotel room and my buying plane tickets... conveniently having location directions to hotel just when I get done at the airport, etc. etc.).

Consider that languages are an always-evolving entity. I'm barely 30 and I have seen idioms and sayings fall and rise within the last decade. Certainly it is true that the best translation of some 20-word sentence would be different if it is done 10 or maybe even 5 years apart.

And of course it is a matter of fact that we all talk about the same things... e.g. some shooting occurred at some place recently, that means people will be talking about that thing and looking it up. It means we might say a name of a place or a hotel that we haven't before said before... the translating service will be better off if it has some awareness of it and then has a bias for voice transcription with cultural awareness, it'll work better that way. For Google to do its best job when it comes to translation, it needs to be connected to all of us, it has to be with us in the Cloud.

[stephenr]

It’s absolutely possible to do machine learning based tasks without sending all data to an ad network that builds a profile of your entire life to serve you ads.

Apple does a lot of on-device work, and anonymises what does need to talk to their backend for (eg map directions).

The problem is, google can’t adopt that pattern even if they want to (which they don’t) because their whole push for years has been about very thin (software wise) clients talking to a largely web based set of google services.

[usrusr]

The question is not does it need cloud, the question is, is it worth it. When you send an audio stream to Google, you are imposing your answer to that question on everybody else in the room.

[webXL]

Or let any third party [view a photo | talk to you on the phone | listen to a voice memo ] with everybody else in the room. We already have answers to those "worth it" questions, largely.

The more important question is whether a third party can use that data to cause you harm, and if that's a concern, I'm afraid the only real solution is to limit your ability to be included in that data.

[ace_of_spades]

Not necessarily… all life works without a cloud doesn’t it? You can certainly realize your example with a completely local AI. You may need the cloud for training (at the moment) but not for day to day execution!