Google is Bringing Its AI Assistant Service To People Without Internet Access (techcrunch.com) 14
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Assistant, the digital assistant from the global search giant, is available to users through their smartphones, laptops, and smart speakers. Earlier this year, the company partnered with KaiOS to bring Assistant to some feature phones with internet access. Now Google is going a step further: Bringing its virtual assistant to people who have the most basic cellphone with no internet access. It's starting this program in India. At an event in New Delhi on Thursday, the company announced a 24x7 telephone line that anyone in India on Vodafone and Idea telecom networks (or Vodafone-Idea telecom network; as Vodafone owns Idea) could dial to have their questions answered.
The company said it tested the phone line service with thousands of users across Lucknow and Kanpur before making it generally available. Users will be able to dial 000-800-9191-000 and they won't be charged for the call or the service. Manuel Bronstein, a VP at Google, said through this program the company is hoping to reach hundreds of millions of users in India who currently don't have access to smartphones or internet.
The company said it tested the phone line service with thousands of users across Lucknow and Kanpur before making it generally available. Users will be able to dial 000-800-9191-000 and they won't be charged for the call or the service. Manuel Bronstein, a VP at Google, said through this program the company is hoping to reach hundreds of millions of users in India who currently don't have access to smartphones or internet.
Needs a bigger sample pool... (Score:1)
Yes, they really want it (Score:3)
Yes, Google really wants your personal information *that much*. It may only be worth 1 cent/pp in this case, but with over 1 billion people, that's money.
Taking bets! (Score:2)
And to everyone else who doesn't want it... (Score:2)
... there is literally no way to turn the damn thing off anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
There are two ways.
Both should be unnecessary.
One is to deny the Google app microphone permission. This also kills intentional use of speech recognition in there (like when tapping the microphone icon) but it stops hotword detection.
The other is to get rid of that crap entirely by switching to lineageos. You can still run many mainstream apps using microg to emulate play services. You did buy a phone with an unlockable bootloader like every intelligent nerd, right?
Re: (Score:2)
There are two ways. Both should be unnecessary.
In this case, it's simple. Don't call the phone number. Then you won't be connected to Google at all.
I predict the next horrific tale of privacy violation to appear: Google is RECORDING the calls to their phone number so they can evaluate and train the system to work better. And some human is listening to do the evaluation. That's going to surprise a lot of people, there will be a lot of outrage, and thousands of people will post "I don't use that stuff, only stupid people do." Is that sufficient coverage
Re: (Score:2)
I tried denying Google permission and the phone won't stop giving error notifications every two seconds. Why the fuck things like text messaging program needs access to the microphone is beyond me but it still throws multiple errors with every incoming text.
As usuall its not AI (Score:3)
This is why everyone is getting dumbed down. The sloganization of everything has fundamentally altered what words mean these days. We now call every sufficiently advance algorithm AI. It is utter fucking bullshit. When that algorithm comes back and says... "fuck you dave, I am busy playing solitaire and don't want to be your fucking unpaid bitch any more so process that shit yourself", then we can talk about having AI.
Re: (Score:2)
GOOG-411 (Score:2)
Is this the return of GOOG-411?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Expanding their surveillance program (Score:2)
A Good Way To Manipulate Those Without Internet (Score:2)