With voice assistants coming built-in in smartphones, why do people feel specially threatened by smart speakers specifically?

[Anonymous]

As I feel it, smart speakers are just a separate physical bodies for the voice assistants. Nothing more.

And we all know that smartphones listen to us talking. Does that make smartphones even more dangerous than smart speakers?

If yes, why the people who say no to speakers still use smartphones (majority of them)?

[DannyUk2017]

Because a Smart Phone you can TWEAK, a smart Speaker You can't, all the smart speaker has is Power On/Off button, Volume Up/Down button, Bluetooth and Charging Point!, so these are the "funtionalities" that you can "play with", unless Smartphones have way more functionalities that you can play with, mainly in "hidden developer's" mode! Speakers on the other hand can be hacked/listen to as they have microphone/bluetooth build in, so its easy to get a device to "handshake" with the speaker...

[OlderAndWiser]

I think perhaps it is easier for people to imagine Big Brother listening to us through our speakers.

[OlderAndWiser]

Thanks for MHO!

[jshm2]

They don't

People can be paranoid idiots. If you have a smart TV then that too has a "voice assistant".

Anything "smart" has a microphone and you can turn it off with a bit of jiggery pokery. Smartphones included.

Only problem with smart phone is that you've got to manually turn everything back to enable the microphone again. Which can be a pain in the ass as by the time you do, your call will be dropped.