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I am interested in getting a Smart Home system with a good voice assistant, but my wife refuses to allow a voice assistant like Google Home or Amazon Alexa because she does not want ANY recordings from our home being stored in the cloud.

For example, this link discusses how Alexa stores requests in the cloud for machine learning of the Alexa system.

Is the Amazon Echo 'always listening' and sending data to the cloud?

Is there any option here? Is there a smart home system that does not store recordings off-site? Any good options to ensure privacy and security with these systems?

She's also worried about the ability of the government to eavesdrop. The above link quotes Intellihub: "Echo ... can be easily hacked and used by government agencies like the FBI to listen in on conversations."

One respondent suggests using the Mute on the bundled remote when not in use: is that sufficient, or could a good hack bypass the Mute request?

Bottom-line: do I have to give up some Privacy & Security to get a Smart Home system?

Scott Duncan
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Keeping the device muted when not in use removes a huge amount of the benefit of a voice assistant, if you have to get up, walk across the room and unmute it to use it you might as well just install the app (Alexa app or an Android with Google Assistant) on your phone and only launch it when you want it.

If you want a dedicated device that doesn't use the cloud then there are projects to roll your own (e.g. http://jasperproject.github.io/) but remember that the benefit of the cloud are:

  • The huge amount of training data which means that it's voice matching gets better and better all the time. A offline version will only be as good as the initial model it is loaded with at the time it's deployed.
  • Other people write all (most) of the integrations/skills for you.
hardillb
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