Artificial Intelligence devices for the home are ever increasing, recent devices examples being Amazon’s Echo “Alexa” and Google Home. A new feature from these home devices is making phone calls “For free” All that needs to be done is saying “OK Google call mum or “hHey Google”.
It calls people that pre-exist in your phone contacts, but more than that, you can call companies or businesses, for example, “OK Google, call Pizza Express”. Google has said that “There’s actually no setup required, call anyone for free, including personal contacts or local businesses, and even dial out with your personal number when we detect your voice.”. Though this isn’t entirely true, as you will need to establish people into your contacts before you can call them. The Amazon Echo also has a calling feature, though users can only call those who also own Amazon Echo devices, a restriction that doesn’t apply in Google Home’s case.
So what does this mean for privacy? Well, the device is only able to make outgoing calls for privacy reasons. Though it has been said that a feature will be added in future models to have a blocking/unblocking function, so there is the possibility of the ability to have incoming calls too! Although the mobile phone has nearly made land lines a thing of the past, this could make the home phone obsolete, maybe…