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Voice Assistants Will Be Difficult To Fire (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: As voice assistants crop up left and right, consumers are facing a decision: Are you an Alexa? A Google Assistant? A Siri? Choose wisely -- because once you pick one voice assistant, it'll be difficult to switch. As Scott Rosenberg writes at Backchannel, "If I want to switch assistants down the line, sure, I can just go out and buy another device. But that investment of time and personal data isn't so easy to replace... Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests. Eventually , the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized."
The companies are not going to be at all accepting of a standard. The only real edge they will have over each other is what services and accounts they are tied too. The assistants are all going to have the same features. If you use Google accounts and services, you'll stick with Google. What's going to happen is the consumer will get screwed and if they want to use Google for services, Amazon for retail and Apple for entertainment they will have to buy three different devices.
Sent from my TARDIS
Dude, you're using a proprietary voice assistant. Of course its primary purpose is to lock you in. That's the purpose of all proprietary communications tools. This is a whole area of software where, from the user's point of view, it is utterly insane and self-destructive to be using proprietary software.
If you want/need to run proprietary software, stick to games. For anything important, it doesn't make sense to use any software that treats you like an adversary.
You aren't your enemy, so you shouldn't be paying to have your computer act as though you are.
(2017 and the above opinion is probably still considered controversial. Everyone knows it's true but some people feel compelled to pretend that common sense is too "inconvenient.")
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If you can't fire them
Don't hire them
Face the facts: You're paying for the 'privilege' of having an always-connected surveillance device in your home (or several of them). You're feeding it your very perosnal information and somehow expecting that to stay private. You think when you 'mute' the microphones that it's not listening, but it likely is. I'm sorry to have to be so blunt about it but if you are buying one of these devices you are not at all being smart. The only smart move here is to never buy one in the first place. Seriously, ask yourself: why do you need one in the first place? Rhetorical question, you don't need one, you WANT one because it's a shiny toy. Now you'll tell me "it's convenient". Tough shit, your 'convenience' should never be placed higher on your list of priorities in life above your safety, and it is not safe to have one of these devices in your home, you are literally giving away the most personal and private information about your lives that you possibly could, and unless you literally unplug it's power supply when you're not actively using it, you are throwing away the last outpost of privacy in your lives: YOUR HOME, because it is always listening.
Stop being stupid, don't buy these things!
Seriously, go outside and go for a walk or something that actually makes you happier.
We went from stores full of stuff being too much of a hassle to drive to and needed things delivered to our doorstep. now it is too much of a chore to pull up a browser to order crap, so we get voice assistants to do it for us. How effing lazy are people? How hollow are their lives?
go ride a bike, walk in the woods, talk with a human, or almost anything else is better for you than holing up with Alexa or Siri to try and fill your void of an existence.