I’ll also toss out that if you privacy and non-annoyance are your goals with an out of the box voice assistant, the only real option these days is a HomePod. I built my smart home with combination of Echos throughout the house, and I pretty much regret it now. I wasn’t as worried about privacy, but these things are so fucking annoying these days. “Start a timer for 5 minutes.” “Okay, do you want to play some bullshit trivia game while you’re timer is going?” No, never. Ever. I mean, at least she’ll still turn the lights on without spouting back something dumb, but that’s just about it. Probably what I’ll be doing now is still using the Alexholes as a speaker target with the mute button on all of the time (better spotify integration) and start replacing with siri balls.
Got tired of trying to figure out what service to watch a show on this week. Back to sailing the 7 seas…