Slashdot Asks: Which Smart Speaker Do You Prefer?

Every tech company wants to produce a smart speaker these days. Earlier this month, Apple finally launched the HomePod, a smart speaker that uses Siri to answer basic questions and play music via Apple Music. In December, Google released their premium Google Home Max speaker that uses the Google Assistant and Google's wealth of knowledge to play music, answer questions, set reminders, and so on. It may be the most advanced smart speaker on the market as it has the hardware capable of playing high fidelity audio, and a digital assistant that can perform over one million actions. There is, however, no denying the appeal of the Amazon Echo, which is powered by the Alexa digital assistant. Since it first made its debut in late 2014, it has had more time to develop its skill set. Amazon says Alexa controls "tens of millions of devices," including Windows 10 PCs.

A new report from The Guardian, citing the industry site MusicAlly, says that Spotify is working on a line of "category defining" hardware products "akin to Pebble Watch, Amazon Echo, and Snap Spectacles." The streaming music company has posted an ad for a senior product manager to "define the product requirements for internet connected hardware [and] the software that powers it." With Spotify looking to launch a smart speaker in the not-too-distant-future, the decision to purchase a smart speaker has become all the more difficult. Do you own a smart speaker? If so, which device do you own and why? Do you see a clear winner, or can they all satisfy your basic needs?

Comments

Mycroft on Raspberry Pi

[Speare]

There's an OSS variant (probably several) which aren't given due attention in the article.

The Mycroft project currently listens locally for the watch word, and aggregates ALL of the subsequent queries as audio through a single source to the online engines like Google, Wolfram or others. This anonymizes a lot of what the engines could learn about individual users.

Their next stage is to expand on the local processing even more, so they will only be sharing plain text to the online engine third parties. This version is due in the first half of this year.

For me, the benefit is simple local Linux-based Python-based skill development. When my kid was young I would make a family computer into a sort of daily-schedule-keeper, announcing the daily tasks like bathtime or bedtime. I would ssh into the machine when my kid started having "conversations" with the computer. So now I can rebuild a little bit of that in my own personalized smart speaker.

Mycroft

[q4Fry]

I am considering backing the Mycroft 2. I am not about to pipe all my audio to Google, Apple, Amazon, et al., but this seems like a fun toy. I passed on the v1 because it used Google's STT, but this one apparently has 8 different STT options, one of which is Mozilla-developed and can run on local hardware.

According to Fast Company, their business model is framed around selling voice services to major companies who are similarly wary about sending client data to Big Tech firms. (The for-example is Land Rover-Jaguar.) This seems reasonable, and it provides incentive for Mycroft (which is open source; in part? in full? I can't quite tell) to continue to play honest or risk the cash from the privacy-conscious corporate partners that they hoped to attract.

I'm not totally sold, yet. I'd be interested in /. views one way or the other, or anecdotes from anyone who has a v1.