What have I done?
I was away from my desk today and I needed to make a note to do something and I pulled out my phone and I was like, “Damn, I cannot be bothered to type this on that teeny screen keyboard with my thumbs.” So I turned on Google Assistant.
It’s like Alexa for your phone, but instead of patching you into the evil Amazon it patches you into the evil Google. Much better. It’s also a really terrific speech-to-text app.
You say “Hey, Google” to wake it up, then “open sticky notes” and “send out a meeting reminder tomorrow” and done. Neat!
Pretty low privacy risk, I thought. I’ll only use it for work stuff and I don’t take my phone everywhere. And then I was poking around the web looking for more fun things I could do with it, and I found this:
Gboard voice API hàs a voice recognition learning processor. The more you use it the better it becomes with that users voice. Unfortunately if you ever clear your cache in Chrome or in Gboard, it takes away some of it’s learned recognized voice commands that has built up in your device memory. But from Googles main CPU that’s connect to your account with recognize voices, it will continue to expand even after you’ve clear your cache on your device because it’s connected to your account. But I’m not sure what Google does with that information if the account is deleted but if I know Google like I think I know Google it will connect the dots if that voice ever gets connected to other account.
And then it occurred to me that from now until the end of time, if I speak in the presence of a Google-enabled device, it will clock who I am and where I am, sure as fingerprints. How could I be so stupid?
But then I thought…Pff! Like they didn’t already have my voice print. And yours and everyone else’s. Yay!
Still, you can ask Google Assistant to tell a Yo Mama joke if you’re feeling blue.
December 2, 2021 — 7:57 pm
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