[pdkl95]

What cell phone?

Of course, given that a lot of the HN crowd currently derives their income from surveillance and/or walled-garden based business models ("analytics", "big data", "software as a service", etc), I expect to be down-voted for suggesting that it is a bad idea to trade your future for a few shiny (and sometimes useful) toys.

I hope everybody that uses Amazon's microphone - or, as you say, a cell phone - realize that you're creating the surveillance state. Right now there is a large effort to normalize surveillance socially, and instead of fighting for you right to privacy, we have a threat full of people talking about how wonderful the bait tastes.

[walterbell]

We need AGPL algorithms and training datasets for voice recognition, plus user-programmable open-source firmware for on-device wake word recognition.

If we can end the false privacy-convenience tradeoff, then the technology can be applied for goals defined by users rather than select business interests.

Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a mature proprietary product that runs locally on Windows. It has an SDK for custom integration, http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index...