Comment by beezischillin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beezischillin | Hacker News Reader

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Same goes for trying to turn on Voice Match (and the voice activated OK, Google), a feature that's supposed to take a snapshot of your voice and activate the assistant, like "Hey, Siri!". They will force you to activate: 1. web/activity history, 2. saving all your voice requests to the Google and they push you to activate Location History.

While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task, they will force you to keep a history of all your voice commands, searches and activity. Voice activation and match won't even work without that on. Even tho the assistant works just fine if you leave those off.

Not to mention all the rest of these that happen, they even push for these during your first phone activation.

I got my first Android phone this year after taking a very long break from Google phones in 2014, due to getting fed up with how much of a mess Android still was around version 5 and Google's unwillingness to fix the issues so I ended up switching to iOS for years. Now I decided to switch my second phone to an Android purely out of curiosity to see what's been happening to the platform and all these creepy-ass prompts in version 9 don't instil much confidence.

>While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task

But voice rec is not local. The reason it asks to store your voice is because they need to send it to their backend for recognition.

They don't need to explicitly save and store a history of every voice command to do voice recognition.

there might be implementations that don't do this for instance Siri or Bixby but that doesn't mean Googles approach is wrong.

It can be unacceptable for your privacy and security threat model but for most it makes 0 difference wether the training continuously happens in the cloud or locally on the NPU inside your phone.

Saving all the clips as much as people love to fear monger it is literally the strategy that objectively leads to the highest quality implementation on the market. Googles Assistant by far understands language most naturally and we owe that to all the free vocal training data google diligently uses.

"but for most it makes 0 difference wether the training continuously happens in the cloud or locally on the NPU inside your phone."

Sadly, nobody will ever know if this is true as the choice doesn't exist.

the choice does exist, Apple iPhone does everything privacy first, Android does things cost savings first (aka the cloud)

Most people seem to like the Google Assistant for more natural interactions and only tolerate siri for her limited uses she can do.

But voice rec is not local

Voice rec was local until about ten years ago. You could even buy software dictation products that installed from CDROM and didn't need a network connection.

I shouldn't need a network connection to do anything voice on my own device. It should only reach out to the network for things it doesn't have local knowledge of.

Can confirm. Microsoft Speech API of ~2007 with little training worked very well for me, even across the room on a crappy microphone I hand-soldered to a 2m cable. If that worked fully off-line without a big performance penalty on mid-end 2007 hardware, it surely can work now.

Furthermore many smartphones can do voice dictation while in airplane mode.

Yes. Is there a voice dialer for Android any more that does the voice recognition locally? There's nothing in the F-Droid store.

If its that easy you should make an app because there's certainly a market for it. The reality is online connected services are far far better.

There's a reason voice rec has only now finally stuck.

On my iPhone, the voice keyboard works pretty well in airplane mode. Not quite as well as when it has signal, but the difference is small… with the sole exception that it recognises everything as if it is English in Airplane mode, and only uses the language of the keyboard (if different) when I have signal.

By default, iOS dictation is also online.

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