John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
Lots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for several reasons I won&#x27;t address, but I will ask this: Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?<p>From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won&#x27;t be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded out or annoyed when I&#x27;m having trouble interfacing with whatever app I&#x27;m currently using. The only reason I can envision using voice controls for anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.<p>Apart from not enjoying voice controls from a functional point of view, is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house? In this era of super crappy security, especially with consumer grade stuff, there&#x27;s a not insignificant chance your stuff is currently being hacked by one or more non-government bad actors (I already assume the US government, and probably a few other governments, already have 24&#x2F;7 access to every mic and camera that is connected to the web in any way).<p>I&#x27;ve been assuming voice commands will die out and that this Alexa &#x2F; Siri hype (hype might not be the right word. buzz? rumblings?) was a result of Amazon and Apple pushing them from a marketing perspective. The amount of comments about Siri in a thread about a random exec being added to Apple is making me re-consider that PoV.