When Windows10/Cortana was released my buddy attached a mixer/switch to his PC allowing him to wire input mics and sound speakers to every room in his house.
And though I can't see any personal uses for such a device, he swears it has changed his life, and the only thing I believe he does with it is tells Cortana to play Van Halan first thing when he wakes up.
I love the image of an old stasi officer seeing the current trend of people paying good money to effectively bug their own appartments. It must be surreal to them.
Stasi used people to bug on people as early as in high school - it was at least in my opinion much more nefarious than passive mass surveillance - at least it's different. I'm from the former GDR and they wreaked havoc over countless families over seemingly bullshit things. So it's difficult to compare IMHO.
But I guess it's not an impossible technical problem to train some machine learning algorithm to classify the voices and the conversation in the room and detect typical behavior patterns of a crime and be it smoking weed with friends.
>the only thing I believe he does with it is tells Cortana to play Van Halan first thing when he wakes up
This is pretty much my usage at the moment with the Google Assistant. I tried it this morning for the first time. I sleep with my tablet on the bed next to me (I have a very big bed and a very small room, so I use half of my bed as a makeshift shelf). I woke up and went "Ok Google, play me some music, please" and then I gently woke up with the sound of whatever I had in my library.
Then I went to take a shower and realized that voice commands are really super useful for that situation. I used them to change songs or tell Google to play me different songs.
The only annoying thing at the moment is that the microphone input seems to be calibrated to a much higher volume than conversational voice so I end up shouting "OK GOOGLE" multiple times to get it to register and I'm pretty sure my flatmates aren't thrilled at that idea.
And though I can't see any personal uses for such a device, he swears it has changed his life, and the only thing I believe he does with it is tells Cortana to play Van Halan first thing when he wakes up.