[hrktb]

Activation words are fuzzy by design.

Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant.

It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.

[anewdirection]

When those designs strip your privacy, 'fuzzy by design' is cery much a bug to the user, and only a feature to the company mining the data.

[hrktb]

I may be biased as I helped a voice recognition internal project in a previous life.

It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.

But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).