[wenc]

This is HN. So you're likely to get a bunch of "no"s.

I'm not sure if you should embrace them outright, but I think it's useful to recognize there are some situations where they are more benefits than disbenefits.

I care about privacy, but for me, I'm willing to accept a certain tradeoff between privacy and utility. Voice assistants are genuinely useful for hands-free operations.

When I'm driving, I ask Siri to play specific playlists or podcasts, to turn the volume up, weather, navigate to this or that place. I take the issue of distracted driving very seriously so I try to never touch my phone while my vehicle is in motion. Siri is helpful in these situations.

At home, I only ask Alexa a couple of things: "weather", "set timer for 5 minutes" (for when I'm cooking and my hands are wet), "connect bluetooth", "play brown noise". I rarely deviate from these requests. But YMMV.

[dgzl]

I understand the utility, I had a friend with a HomePod who used Siri for everything and I became jealous of how smoothly he used it to his benefit. I just don't see how in the future my voice is going to be protected. If I don't use it, they'll probably still have my voice.

[wenc]

Re: voice -- yep, you and every celebrity -- it's already possible to synthesize voices from a small sample.

https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai

Alexa can already talk like Samuel L Jackson.

https://www.amazon.com/Samuel-L-Jackson-celebrity-voice/dp/B...

It's a risk, but to me it's also a part of living in this century. Human voice impersonators have always existed. When Photoshop became a phenomenon, everybody knew that photographs could be manipulated. SFX departments have always been able to produce fake scenes -- and now with deep learning, more people are able to do it (albeit somewhat badly). Not advocating that anyone feeds training data to voice assistants, but in the end it's a personal decision based on what you value.

For me, it's impossible to uninvent technology, so all we can do is to manage the risks.

[dgzl]

So you're suggesting I embrace the tech?

I think I'll do this. I don't feel like I can reasonably protect myself from data-snooping companies, whether I use their products or not.

[wenc]

If it fits with your values and are ok with giving up some (but not all) privacy, sure.