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by failed_ideas 4144 days ago
I'm thinking it's quite handy for a quadriplegics, those with learning disabilities, children, elderly, arthritis sufferers, parkinson's sufferers, thalidomide sufferers, disable in general, etc... Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean that it's not the number one feature in someone else's life.
1 comments

Sure, I'm not saying it shouldn't exist. If it's a feature you want, then you need to accept the fact that it has to send data to a remote server in order for it to do the thing you want it to do. If you have concerns about privacy, then disable it. I don't see the point of all this hand-wringing about "OMG Samsung is spying on me!". Like there's somebody listening on the other end, waiting for you to start reciting your bank account info in the living room so they can pick it up, you know, like how people sit around in front of their TV doing that, right?
Well, I frequently see the people mentioned above, especially the elderly needing help with their phones or email or online banking, and giving their passwords to a trusted family member thinking that they are the only ones listening. So yea, it happens, a LOT. And big companies like Samsung and Sony never get hacked, right? MITM never happen, that's jus fantasy, right?
If that's a concern, you shouldn't use any online service at all. There's nothing special about voice command that makes it more susceptible to being hacked than every other service that you use every single day. In fact, it's a great deal more difficult, because now the attacker has to have an equally sophisticated voice recognition system at their disposal in order to interpret the intercepted data.

Besides, when they can hack the database itself and get a list of what they know to be passwords, why wouldn't they just do that instead of hacking a bunch of voice snippets and combing through them hoping to maybe find where somebody said a password. It's stupid.

These aren't even logical arguments. I've presented use cases where voice recognition may be the only feasible way to interact. Is a voice recognition server's security as secure as my banks? Seriously, I'm done arguing with someone who fails to rebut logical arguments and just doubles down on a fairly ignorant position.
Just because you don't seem to understand the logic, doesn't mean it's not logical.
Marginalizing an entire group of people simply because it doesn't fit with your narrative isn't logical, it's ignorance.
>In fact, it's a great deal more difficult, because now the attacker has to have an equally sophisticated voice recognition system at their disposal in order to interpret the intercepted data.

Or you just pass the data to Siri or Cortana (or whatever microsoft is calling it). Protecting against hacking is defense in depth. If the database is well protected and monitored, attack the target that is not well protected and monitored.