Last year, I was gifted an Amazon Echo; stunned, I stared at the gifter and thought to myself, have you ever met me…do you know me at all? The side of the Echo box listed features, starting with “fair-field voice control, with 7-microphone array and beam-forming technology to hear you from across the room.” Echo didn’t leave the box for six months.

When I finally did open Echo, I was interested in comparing functions of Echo against those of ZOE; the latter smart home assistant was developed by Protonet with privacy in mind – nothing goes to the cloud so it couldn’t be turned into a surveillance device.

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