>What do you do with it? Like what is a typical use case / interaction ? Do you ask it to put on a movie or tell you the time ?
Control the lights in the house, make sure the garage door and front door are closed and locked at night, adjust the temperature, play some music (specific band, song, or genre) on one of the TVs or on my computer, read me things like the weather, calendar entries, emails, ask it how long it'll take me to get to work right now, ask it about conversions or math-ey things I need done, have it make notes (specifically notes that can alert me when I get to work, or the next time i'm at a supermarket, etc...), set alarms, create calendar entries, send emails/instant messages (almost always short and sweet, but still useful). Have it lookup "knowledge graph" kinds of things like what time a store closes at, when does a music album go on sale, what kind of reviews did [movie] get, when does [movie] come out.
And that's just the stuff I've used it for in the last month or so.
On the phone, it can do even more:
Have it navigate me places, and ask it how long until the next turn while on a motorcycle (through a bluetooth setup in the helmet). It will alert me when I need to leave for work using my usual route, it can infer where I am going when i'm not navigating there, and can alert me about traffic incidents on the route, and suggest an alternate route (this one is fucking cool when it happens). It gives me severe weather alerts for my location, notifies me of things like price drops or new releases of things i'm interested in, and shows me almost an "rss feed" kind of thing for news articles that I'm probably interested in (this one is hit or miss, but i'd say every time I look at least one of them is something I wanted to know about). Just today it gave me a notification that I told it to remember. What I said was "remind me to call my doctor tomorrow afternoon", and about an hour ago it put a notification on my phone saying "call my doctor" with a "call" button on it. When clicking the call button, it started dialing my doctor's office. That's what I want from an AI, and it's working great so far.
>I totally disagree people wanted all their personal information fed to private corporations in the "cloud" BTW. Completely disagree. It's Orwellian.
Well that's a strawman... It's like saying that "people wouldn't want to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars to get some wood and cement" when talking about buying a house.
People aren't dumb, they know these devices aren't magic. They know that if you ask what the weather is, obviously the device needs to know your location. If you ask it to play some music you like, it obviously needs to know your preferences. If you ask it how long it'll take to drive to work, it needs to know where you work. In most cases people don't want to spend hours on hours setting up every little setting to tell the system all this information, they just want it to work, so it just works. It infers information, it remembers preferences, it figures out connections that you didn't even know where there. And in return you get a wonderful device that can help you in your life. If you don't want that, it's fine. You can not use it, you can have google delete all information associated with you, and you can disable all tracking and gathering.
But let's not pretend that people don't want the outcome that handing over information can provide. They want the AI, and in order to do that, the AI needs to know them. These devices are being sold as being able to learn about you the fastest, and use it the most, it's not like they are being shady here.
