[jcrawfordor]

This story was widely reported, but it's a little questionable. The slides are genuine, but they seem more like a prospectus for something Cox wants to do than something that they're actually doing. The presentation also never claims the "always listening" that people are concerned about, and instead just refers to "a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior" from "smart devices." The idea that this is smartphones listening to you pervasively is entirely something people have read into it, not something the slides say or even really suggest. I think most readers in the industry find it far more likely that they are describing reanalysis of consumer interactions with voice assistants (probably not even of the audio but of the transcript). That would presumably be the one in the cable boxes their parent company distributes, because access to that kind of data from other voice assistants seems difficult to negotiate and they do not claim to have it.

If you review the actual presentation (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...), none of the claims in it are that remarkable. The whole kerfuffle seems to have come from a combination of the presentation actually being incredibly vague (probably intentionally to allow them to overstate the capability---this is a presentation for sales pitches) and some confirmation bias on the part of 404 Media, reading into it what they were looking for. But there's also a healthy amount of "news laundering," a lot of the articles cribbing off of 404 (like this techtimes one) actually make stronger claims than the original 404 piece does. It has a fair amount of weaseling that it's not clear how the slide deck should be interpreted, whether it's a real or speculative capability, etc.

If you've ever worked in enterprise software sales, you would be extremely wary of interpreting the slide deck the way a lot of these articles do. It reads like a lot of bluster.

[brookst]

I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.

[Suppafly]

>I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.

The company I work for has had to cancel contracts and claw back money a few different times from vendors that have promised features that were mandatory in our industry that weren't actually available in the software. One I recall was a pricey leave of absence tracking platform that didn't actually consider hipaa compliance to be important.

[geoduck14]

>I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh

Yup. Or if you've ever built enterprise software - after a sales engineer sold a featuee that doesn't exist l. Ugh

[yencabulator]

Sales not understanding their own product is a long-running joke. My favorite anecdote of it was our sales person demonstrating a highly-available system by removing power cables from all nodes. That's going to be a tough feature to provide by next quarter.