[richardesigns]

There was a really good article on 'locking down' voice assistants I read recently in Make: (Spring 20) where the author proposes 3d printing 'hats' that sit over your Alexa / Google Assistant and has electronics inside that listen to you and pass your message on to the voice assistant. Their approach was to stop the device from listening to you all the time.

IMO Alexa and Google are useless, half the time they don't hear you, half the time they hear you when you're not even talking to them and respond with something completely random. Google now refuses to talk to me because we messed up the personalisation and can't work out how to go back to just being anonymous.

Apple's Homepod however can't access the internet for answering questions but has a far far superior ability to hear you and respond.

We basically use our voice assistants to turn music on and off. Honestly that's all my friends ever seem to use these evil privacy invading devices for!

I trust Apple a bit more with my data than I do Google or Amazon.