HomePod, according to Apple, is a powerful speaker and intelligent home assistant capable of handling everyday tasks. The reviews universally agreed that the speaker is indeed incredibly impressive for the size and money, but is hardly the smartest one in the market. and Google’s Home Speaker are considerably more capable when it comes to answering questions and undertaking tasks.
This, of course, is because of the fact that Apple controls the personal data available to both itself and to any third party developer in contrast to Amazon’s Alexa which opens us to any third party developer and Google’s Assistant which has gobbled up as much data as possible to make it smart and capable. Although neither of the approaches is better than the other, every company creating an intelligent assistant has to decide on which side of the scale it wants to sit on: The really smart and intrusive one, or the really dumb and safe one.
Google sits on the smart and very intrusive end as it monitors a whole bunch of online and offline activities in order to predict what you were going to want to know and when. Apple, on the contrary, has placed a far greater priority on the privacy of customer data. It limits the data it collects and when it does collect your data, it does so anonymously. For example, Siri learns your voice and the data is associated only with a randomly assigned number. Thus, Siri does not know who you are or what your Apple ID is.
Apple follows a very stringent privacy policy, which starts by saying that Apple believes that privacy should be a fundamental right. The tech giant is also famously known to resist strong pressure from the FBI to weaken its security. It argues that the user privacy is important enough to defend the principle even in the face of terrorism.
All of this means that it is no surprise that Apple has the least smart assistant.
Across the world, privacy has different levels of importance for everyone. For some people, the privacy of their data and communication is a life-and-death matter. So, we’re very glad that at least there’s one company that is sitting at the extreme privacy end. Although for an average customer, privacy wasn’t so high on the radar during the HomePod launch. To them, the most visible issue was that their HomePod was dumber than its rival. However, the increasing publicity around the privacy controversies is changing that.
