Google Home can ID you by your voice
Smart home hubs are continuing to evolve, and Google just added a pretty important feature to its own hub, the Google Home.
Previously, Home linked up only to the account of whomever set it up first. Now, the device will be able to handle multiple accounts and tell who’s speaking to it, offering personalized answers to some questions.
That’s a feature that Amazon’s Echo doesn’t have. And it’s important for a voice assistant that’s designed to run your household. For an assistant such as Siri, which lives on devices used by just one person, multi-account support isn’t as important. But home hubs sit in a central location and operate things such as your lights or your thermostat that everyone will want to be able to control.
Being able to identify an individual’s voice may also help cut down on some unwanted surprises. Google said in a statement that the new feature makes it so that “only you would be able to shop via Google Home.” So others — i.e., your kids or an intelligent parrot — shouldn’t be able to tell Home to buy something on your account. That avoids instances like one in San Diego this past January when Amazon Echo units started ordering dollhouses after hearing a news anchor say “Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.” The anchor was reporting on a story about — what else? — a child buying something without permission on the Echo.
(Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
That said, the company also noted the voice feature isn’t yet foolproof. “We’re just getting started and we won’t be perfect,” the statement said. “We don’t recommend that users rely upon voice identification as a security feature.”
While there are benefits to having home hubs distinguish different voices, there are also some privacy implications to think about.
Consumers worried about their voice data being collected in general should think twice before picking up a home hub, said Bradley Shear, of the privacy-focused, Maryland-based Shear Law. With this new feature, he said, it’s worth keeping in mind that Google will have even more specific information about you, which could be used in ways that consumers may not realize — particularly if it’s combined with other information tied to your Google account.
Consumers should also think about how this information could be used outside of the company, Shear said. He pointed to a recent murder case in Arkansas where police asked Amazon for audio recorded from the suspect’s home hub, the Echo.
Shear said that case illustrated
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how recordings made in your home may end up being used in unexpected ways.
“It has a clean voiceprint from you,” Shear said, speaking of the new feature. “Once something is digitized, you don’t know where it could end up.”
After all, while both Google Home and Alexa devices collect voice data only when you use their respective wake phrases — “Alexa,” “OK Google” or “Hey, Google” — anyone who owns one of these devices also knows that they can sometimes trigger by accident. That opens up the potential for comments you make in private to be taken out of context or shared to an audience you never intended, particularly if the recording can be definitively identified as your voice. (Users can wipe their voice recordings from their Google accounts, per the company’s privacy policy.)