Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Amazon’s new all-in-one and laptop designs could get Alexa into even more PCs (theverge.com)
5 points by mabey 2941 days ago
2 comments

That is super creepy. What about people in the range of those notebooks that don't want to be spied on?
For an always-on PC, having far-field microphones for assistant use is a no-brainer, but putting them in laptops and convertibles is a lot stranger: Don't you want those computers to aggressively sleep/conserve power?
It depends on how much power it consumes, doesn't it? Phone hardware has been doing very low power voice-wake-up for a hardware generation or three already. It's part of the argument of why "Ok, Google", and "Hey, Cortana", and "Hey, Siri" are so long (and somewhat unwieldy when said often) as standard wakeup phrases to both avoid false positives and lower power consumption for passively listening for a wakeup keyword.