HomePod mini works with your iPhone for requests like hearing your messages or notes, so they are completed on device without revealing that information to Apple.
This is the big differentiating feature, along with the seamless integration within the rest of Apple's product line.
EDIT: HomePod does this too but it was not at a price point nor size that competed with other assistants.
I don't even really use any other Apple products, and have never really been particularly comfortable with smart assistants, but I have to say that the steps that they've taken here with E2E, non-AppleID-tied identifiers, on-device computation, and of course the really good price point have got me seriously considering a purchase from them for the first time in a long time.
For my family members that already have Apple products for their tablet, phone, etc., but have either Amazon Echo or Google Home smart assistants, I'm definitely looking that these as an option for holiday presents.
I'm pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, iPad, MBP), but when it comes to smart speakers, I've always used a combination of Echo and Alexa-compatible Sonos devices.
The Alexa devices have always bothered me. Not just because of the baseline privacy concerns, but because it seems so damn easy to activate the trigger word on accident. The absolute worst part being a false positive activation of my Sonos system while watching a movie/show. When this happens (and it happens a lot), the audio volume of the show is lowered significantly to allow Alexa to hear the rest of the command.
Pause the show, wait til "she" stops listening, rewind the show very slightly because I missed whatever was just said due to the volume shift, resume the video, instantly pause again at the moment she was originally triggered until she stops listening, resume the show, this time without having to rewind since I paused soon enough not to miss any dialog.
Maddening.
And the fact that all of these false positives get sent straight to Amazon doesn't make me feel great.
I didn't need a HomePod for its audio quality since I already have great quality with the Sonos system, and couldn't justify the original HomePod's price as a command/control-focused smart speaker with a home already filled with Alexa devices.
All of that to say, HomePod mini is perfect for me.
I can throw out my Echos, disable Alexa on the Sonos system, and scatter a couple of Minis to replace the Echos.
I mean, if you binge The Witcher TV series you’ll probably trigger your apple voice products a lot. It’s the unfortunate consequence of choosing real names for virtual assistants. Only google home is really immune to this.
I know exactly what you mean, but if you say "cancel", it will shut it off faster. It is still a big annoyance which I hope gets fixed at some point in the future.
I suspect that the device is constantly recording the audio in your room, and sending that to Amazon’s servers in the cloud. Because I doubt that the little puck has enough processing power inside it to handle speech recognition.
This allows Amazon the ability to continually upgrade their servers, without the need to upgrade the puck.
And only when the server detects it’s prompt, “Alexa”, will it send a response back to the puck. This is how the little device appears to be so responsive.
And not surprisingly, this bit of functionality is not marketed by Amazon. After all, who the hell in their right mind, would want to be constantly monitored, and have all their private conversations at home be secretly recorded by Amazon.
In fact, I suspect that all the voice assistant devices from other manufacturers, like Google, are doing exactly this.
re: on-device computation, you'll note from the presentation that they said that no data is sent to Apple _until you say "Hey Siri"_. They're still doing transcription in the cloud which requires sending your voice for Apple to process and store.
I have no issues personally with using cloud services like this but they very much used weasley language in the presentation and website to obscure the fact that Apple's cloud absolutely will get access to your unencrypted raw utterances following their wakeword detection, and cause people to conclude that that wasn't happening.
As a side-note I find it a bit surprising that with all the history Apple has with Siri and the meaningfully powerful on-device ML acceleration that they still can't download and run a recognition model on-device that wouldn't require streaming your speech to Apple's servers...
They don’t tie your request to your Apple ID and you can opt out of any recording being stored. Presumably this would make it impossible for a government body to subpoena your recordings, which as we’ve seen with Alexa is entirely possible.
Pretty sure they do transcribe locally and only send text to cloud to interpret it. So still not private, but no audio is sent (unless for special cases).
Meanwhile a friend of mine flat refused to even consider buying any such device, from any vendor, because he's concerned about being spied on.
He cited several real incidents where vendors like Amazon had been caught listening in and sending audio clips to random subcontractors for analysis.
Several huge companies, including Facebook, Google, and Amazon have made it their business to maximally violate the privacy of the general public.
This rubs off on companies like Apple that treat customer privacy seriously.
The "free market" doesn't stop rampant abuse, and doesn't stop damage to unlucky bystanders. If everyone cheats, then the incentive will be to cheat also. If everyone violates privacy, then there will be little to no benefit in not also violating privacy. Certainly not if consumers simply won't believe you.
It's the same logic as: "Every politician is corrupt, so why should I vote for you Mr Honest Guy? You must be corrupt also! I'd rather vote for Mr Clearly On the Take, I like the way he smiles".
Everyone is cheating (they’re adtech companies) but Apple isn’t. Apple doesn’t have to cheat. They just charge it upfront, sure Siri won’t ever catch up because of the lack of data (knowledge graph like Google), but I’m fine with a crappy Siri than evil smart Alexa.
there's no way to delete photos from icloud immediately and I was also googling a bit and there's some article from infosec company and they were able to recover deleted photos few months after they should be deleted forever (I was googling about how to delete those photos immediately).
now, I don't have anything useful there but it pissed me off a lot and I'm definitely not going to use devices from one company, no matter what they say I'm missing
That is a naive (and demonstrably false) assertion.
Apple's privacy stance is really just marketing, like "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
You don't have to use an apple device for more than a minute to realize this.
For example, you cannot use a new apple iphone without activating it with apple.
In the first screen or two, you are presented with their privacy policy, with is literally hundreds of pages long.
The rest of the setup is full of dark patterns, and even though it is GDPR compliant, it is very hard not to come out of the process without signing in or allowing them access to your data.
I think all of this comes from "business common sense" which is based on fear. They want data (and control) because it is an easier and more guaranteed way to make and sell things.
The only way out of this (for all of us) is actually robust competition by someone who will do it right and not collect data in the first place. (hint: it will help if they use rounded corners, gradients and transparency)
I’m not convinced. Fundamentally, Apple is a services and a hardware company. They have no business in advertisement. Do you follow Stratechery (Ben Thompson)? He writes about Apple’s privacy fundamentalism here (midway through the post): https://stratechery.com/2019/privacy-fundamentalism/
Aside from the fact that Apple DOES do advertising, you have to understand that even outside this - your data is valuable to apple and they take steps to keep it turned on. In some cases they are contractually obligated to collect the data.
Here's the thing -- by circumstance they are like arms dealers stuck selling arms to both sides. They must entice app developers to develop for their platform, and they must also entice consumers to buy their products.
Personally I think if apple was concerned about privacy, they would let you see what your phone is doing, and let you firewall your phone (one that could block apple traffic).
Apple certainly does have an advertising platform for the App Store and Apple News. They describe their privacy stance here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223
Maybe this is better in practice than other ad platforms, but they explicitly say that they use information about you to serve you targeted ads such as: location, age, gender, purchases from the App Store, what news you read, etc etc.
>Meanwhile a friend of mine flat refused to even consider buying any such device, from any vendor, because he's concerned about being spied on.
I solved this problem for my HomePod by denying it outgoing internet access on my router. Bonjour-based AirPlay support works great, and if Siri somehow became activated by accident despite my disabling it on the device, nothing could be sent to Apple.
How is it different though? Doesn't Siri on your phone send your recording to its backend to figure out what you need anyways? So it's just an extra step?
I think the difference stated above, was that for messaging, calls and other phone related activities it’s not sent. I’m not sure you can say the same for Google.
On Pixel 4, 4a and 5, assistant does most queries on devices with the Neural processor. I wouldn't be surprised if they bring that capability to speakers too eventually. Though that increases the price of course. HomePod Mini is equivalent to Google Mini or Echo Dot but costs 3x the price. Maybe it's all the Apple Tax but my guess is that they had to put a pretty strong processor to do NLP on-device.
My interpretation of that was your voice query is still sent to Apple and interpreted as whatever text/command, but the contents of the text message are not pulled from iCloud, instead they are pulled from within your local network directly from your iPhone. So all of your requests still do get processed in the cloud on Apple servers, but they don’t wind up with copies of the content of your messages (unless of course you enable iCloud back ups or iMessage cloud sync). This is definitely an improvement versus how things work on the Google side, but it’s a far cry from nothing at all getting sent to Apple.
The problem is that Google's voice recognition results in false positives. I've seen a few recordings on my Google privacy page with nothing but ambient noise from my apartment.
Well to my knowledge, Apple doesn't even have a similar page; That instills my confidence in Google rather than Apple, as I know for sure Apple can't be foolproof with false positives
A key difference is that Siri doesn’t use personal identifiers - I.e. it does send the recording for interpretation, but it isn’t associated with your user account.
Yeah, that'll be a differentiator for me. We have a few Echo Dots, which are pretty neat devices, but I'm not a huge fan of providing audio to Amazon and Google. Also, my neighbor was getting swatted and narrowed it down to his Echo Dots.
Yes, the police showed up at his door a couple times saying somebody called 911. He disconnected everything from his network, no more visits from the police. He plugged devices back in one at a time, leaving a day or so between devices. Within an hour of plugging in the Echo devices, the police were back. He unplugged the Echo devices, no issues since.
I meeeaaannn come on, I feel like this person is withholding some important details about why the police show up at their door. This is just too ridiculous to be real.
I find it odd that you say you're not a huge fan of providing audio to Amazon, yet have bought a few devices that actually do that and then have proceeded to put them into your home...?
For someone who isn't a fan of providing audio, you seem to have willfully done so.
The OP could not be a huge fan of sending the audio, but find the utility of the devices worth it for now. Very little in life is binary, and instead we make these sorts of trade offs every day.
I ordered two today as they were 20 €/each during Prime Day. I plan on using them as speakers mostly, so I'll have a look at where they talk to and maybe drop that connection...
I don't think Apple understands what 'world class' assistant means.
I've tried their intercom feature on an iPhone using Hey Siri. The message doesn't get recorded if you don't speak english. It works fine if you press and hold side button tho (my preferred way to use Siri anyway).
I would probably consider Homepod or Homepod mini if they've got batteries and bluetooth. Heck they could've even used MagSafe chargers for them. Now I've got two Soundcore Motion+ that got amazing hifi sound.
This is the big differentiating feature, along with the seamless integration within the rest of Apple's product line.
EDIT: HomePod does this too but it was not at a price point nor size that competed with other assistants.