5G paranoids, IMHO, have attention span of a fly and, frankly speaking, just too dumb. I just don't see one of them executing such complex project, and avoiding FBI attention while doing it.

Pretty coherent point of view.

Siri from Apple was launched in 2011, as some other commenter noted below. Also, "On June 14, 2011, Google announced at its Inside Google Search event that it would start to roll out Voice Search on Google.com during the coming days".

If it does not count as 'typical consumer to experience it', well, I do not know what counts then.

9 years ago, I mind you, not 5. And I think that 5 years ago voice recognition was more-or-less good already. In 4 years both Apple and Google acquired large enough datasets to learn from, afer initial launch of their products in 2011.

What we are still struggling with is proccesing of fuzzy queries, something among the lines of 'Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout', but this is not a voice recognition problem (though typical consumer can think it is).

But you can't claim that something "wasn't possible 5 years" ago, if 7 years ago said feature was included in inexpensive consumer product (LG TV).

I'm not acting cynical, but it's tiresome for me to see people who claim that 20-30 years ago we all were living in a caves and catching bugs with wooden sticks, and now boom, ML!

Regarding "something truly different", well, my personal computing / mobile experience not changed that much from 2015. Honestly speaking, progress from 1995 to 2000 felt much more impressive and 'truly different'. I mean, think of it, during this timeframe we went from DOOM via V.34 modems to amazon.com and ordering pizza online.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/business/media/facebook-a...

Correct. The problem of course is scale. How much money such blog can accept from advertisers before it will get absurdly expensive to buy ads from such blog?

FB gives you targeting and scale, and you need both to run meaningful advertising campaign.

FTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. <...> As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

If some party got 30% of votes in Germany, stop blaming facebook and 'state actors'. Germans are better then this, they are not zombies, and they have a lot of information sources to pick up news/opinions from.

I mean, government contractors aren't saints in every country, it's a well known fact, but in Russia they are on a whole different level.

And of course, 50K out of 100M will be really allocated to buy some shitty FB ads to make screenshots and present it to higher-ups.

-- Trump being re-elected

-- Yellow Vests riots in France

-- Brexit

-- Alternative for Germany party rise in Germany

and all of these happened because of Facebook+Russia.

Sorry, but this is just Q-Anon level global conspiracy theory adopted for progressives. :-(

There are two options here.

1. People are not really happy with current status quo so they are looking to choose alternative leaders via elections, just as expected in democratic countries.

2. Some bad guys post bad stuff on Facebook and, like, 30% of german voters read it and march to election booth like zombies to vote the way bad guys said them to vote (for Alternative for Germany).

Well, you can pick which theory survives the Occam Razor test better.

EDIT: And oh, wrt to "a large voice so quickly" -- when a lot of stuff happens quickly (i mean, between 1 or 2 elections) -- yes, a lot of people can change their minds quickly. Turbulent times, you know. In stable times people change their minds slowly.

The only gripe EU is having with Facebook is about privacy violations, as I can see.