There's a way to prevent this, but I doubt any of the major players will do it:
Allow the owners of the device choose their own "activation words".
Leave the default "branded" activation sentence as-is, but allow the user to customize it as they see fit. This won't happen, of course, because of the whole "branding" thing (like the user is going to forget which service they are using?).
This just hammers another nail into my decision not to get one of these devices; instead, it would probably be easier and better to build my own, using a raspberry pi or something similar for the "front end". I'd probably still have to use one of the big players search engines or such, but I could also hit anything else I wanted to, as well.
I tend to wonder if this is going to be the trend? Those who have or desire more freedom will have to build it themselves, and those who can't or won't - they'll just have to shoulder the burden of not being as free...
There are ways the State could make DIY uneconomical or near-to-impossible (and I don't think the scenario is realistic anyhow) - but if that ever happened - if things ever got to the point of it just being too much - I'll just go offline. I've got more than enough data and junk to keep me amused for the rest of my life. Plus, I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment, either.
Freely available speech to text is garbage compared to what the big players are doing. Additionally their activation words usually trigger a special microcontroller extensively trained to listen for such a phrase, and then the more expensive processing kicks in.
The free spy-economy option weakens or kills privacy-respecting community and commercial options yet again. This won't stop until this crap is illegal.
I really just want to be able to activate my devices' voice control by saying "Computer". Siri/Alexa/Google just don't have the same Star Trek ring to them ;)
And all of these are poor choices. My partner's name is Alex, I use Amazon and Computer all the time in daily conversations around the house, the only one that is semi-rare is Echo. Ideally it should let you choose any word.
Ideally, sure. That's far from the only thing that's non-ideal about an Amazon Echo, though. The person I was responding to was interested in using "computer" as their activation word.
Allow the owners of the device choose their own "activation words".
Leave the default "branded" activation sentence as-is, but allow the user to customize it as they see fit. This won't happen, of course, because of the whole "branding" thing (like the user is going to forget which service they are using?).
This just hammers another nail into my decision not to get one of these devices; instead, it would probably be easier and better to build my own, using a raspberry pi or something similar for the "front end". I'd probably still have to use one of the big players search engines or such, but I could also hit anything else I wanted to, as well.
I tend to wonder if this is going to be the trend? Those who have or desire more freedom will have to build it themselves, and those who can't or won't - they'll just have to shoulder the burden of not being as free...
There are ways the State could make DIY uneconomical or near-to-impossible (and I don't think the scenario is realistic anyhow) - but if that ever happened - if things ever got to the point of it just being too much - I'll just go offline. I've got more than enough data and junk to keep me amused for the rest of my life. Plus, I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment, either.