I've previously worked on the Google Assistant from several angles, and this demo'd awesome, and I was very surprised. Then I saw it is listed as "soon" on the roadmap. Then I remembered the demo was very much a video, not a demo.
I might be jaded from years of bigco, and I'm rooting for you, hopefully you're already set enough financially you can ignore this, innovate, and already have teams of people demo'ing a solution internally:
As a company, you can't get trust back. Fudging a bit and projecting what you'll have when you ship is very tempting when the competition is this thick. Having this much competition also implies there will be choice, and given the use case, it's likely people will always opt for choices that appear more trustworthy.
On a completely separate note, I've seen many, many, teams of extremely bright people be funded for 2-4 years on things that you'd think "it can't be that hard..." and it turns out it's impossible. Not this specifically, but voice adjacent stuff.
Again, rooting for you, but a forthright version of me would have just said it'll never work as demo'd, and it's worth considering what impact it'll have long-term on your success if even just 20% of whats on the roadmap doesn't work out, you're already talking about it in present tense, and it's absolutely key to your user trust story. 20% is conservative in my experience.
I'm sure you've considered how the BIPA law in Illinois applies since it's one of (if not the) strongest biometrics privacy laws in the U.S. Could you share some detail on how you store and process unknown voices before consent?
You're wording in this comment (and the twitter/comment video) gives off the same vibes as the google april 1st videos for things like gmail motion (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD8wFTLnQKeDsINWn8Wj...). I honestly thought this was full sarcasm at first.
Just a tip - consent shouldn't be a mode, it should be the default. Might want to re-think how you market the idea because done correctly, it is a powerful feature.
So you record people without consent and pinky swear that your software will “unrecord” after the fact? I don’t know if you can just hand wave that away… ship has probably sailed on anyone enforcing these kinds of laws I guess, good luck
I'm reminded of how I felt it was unfair that the hotword detector for assistants was discussed as "recording", but it's really just parsing a byte stream, never storing it.
Voice ID systems I'm familiar with work on a similar premise.
Consent Mode makes it possible for the first time ever to only capture the voice of people who have given consent to be recorded.
It uses voice identification to determine who is speaking and verbal opt-in to make it frictionless to ask for consent.
Here's a direct link to the timestamp of the announcement where we show how Consent Mode works: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383?t=26...