This AI assistant wants to protect privacy by spurning the cloud

Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, Hindi says, have trained consumers to think that every voice command must be processed and stored online, even if the task has no inherent connection to the internet. With Snips, he's hoping to prove them wrong. For the past couple of years, Snips has been building an offline voice assistant for individual developers and enterprises that don't want to depend on Big Tech. Now, the startup is working on its own consumer hardware, including a set of smart speakers and a base station for processing voice commands locally. "We're making a very strong bet on people's willingness to trade, basically, a recognized brand for privacy," Hindi says.