At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
Lol agreed. Btw if you're into sensor, keen to chat. I'm the founder of crewline.ai, just raised our seed and are bringing on a couple key founding engineering hires.