I’ve occasionally played with the various Virtual Assistants. Siri I consider to be about useless. Cortana is probably one of the best, but still not close to “there” yet. Google isn’t bad, but is missing quite a lot.
One hallmark of VAs is to give you alerts about news items or sports or whatever. I turn off the sports stuff as best as I can, because I don’t give a crap about sports. But news alerts only come from “mainstream” sources. These are not sources I need, or trust.
Google Assistant finally showed up on my Note 5. I played around with it some, and went into the settings. As for news sources, it only gives you the typical ones: BBC, PBS, MSLGBTV, and the rest. I turned off all but Fox News. Then I tried a test. I said “Show me headlines from Breitbart.com”.
It showed me a Media Matters article ABOUT Breitbart. Total bullshit.
I’m glad for some of the alt-tech we have already. I was an early backer of Infogalactic. I got on gab.ai as soon as I heard about it. Somehow, at a time when the waiting list was two weeks, I had my account in under two hours on a Sunday. Right place, right time? There’s a new on called vk.com. So far, Matt Forney is the only person I know on there.
Gab is a replacement for Twitter. A lot of alt-right and conservatives that got kicked off Twitter have migrated over there. VK is supposedly a Facebook replacement. Both have a long way to go, but the fact that they exist is a good sign.
I doubt I’ll get kicked off Twitter, but I don’t use it much. I mostly just favorite some of President Trump’s tweets, and now Malik Obama. And a few others I see when I’m on there.
I hope we start getting some alt-right friendly software soon. I’d love a virtual assistant that can give me news alerts about President Trump that aren’t from the Huffington post. Let me select my own sources of news.
I have some Gab invites if you’re interested. Email me or leave a comment.
