Are always-on home speakers "creepy?"

LOS ANGELES - We know that Big Brother has been watching our every move for years--but are you ready to have your home conversations monitored as well?

Following on the footsteps of Amazon’s smash Echo connected speaker, which reads the weather and news, plays music, and turns lights on and off, based on your voice instructions, Google is set to launch its rival product, Google Home, later this year.

And this week reports surfaced saying Apple could be joining the fray with its own speaker featuring the Siri personal digital assistant from the iPhone.

Which begs the question--how do you feel about buying a connected speaker for the kitchen that could listen to every word you’re saying?

“I think it’s creepy as hell," says Jonathan Nolan, the creator and executive producer of CBS’s Person of Interest TV show, which has long explored the dark side of artificial intelligence.

We devoted our #TalkingTechRoundtable podcast this week to the potentially thorny subject of always-on devices in the home.

On the podcast, Nolan likened having a home speaker listening to you at all times to welcoming in a “vampire.”

“The rule set is the same,” he said. “Once you invite it in, you’re not getting it back out of your house again.”

We all know that companies like Google, Amazon and others have been watching and listening to us, “but this is the first time they’re making you aware of the fact that they are listening”

Amazon’s ads for Echo, which has turned into a surprise hit for the company, tout the speaker’s readiness to pop into action once you use the “wake” word of Alexa to pose a question or command. For Google Home, the command will be "OK Google."

The potential for what a connected speaker could do is a big positive, said Aubrey Cattell, the head of next generation products at software powerhouse Adobe.

“There are more and more things that are listening to us, and trying to understand our actions, but that’s so the technology industry can serve up better and better products. I don’t want to be listened to as Aubrey Cattell, but I don’t mind algorithms understanding my behavior as 1-2-3-4 so that I could get better targeted content. The problem for me today is finding things I want to discover. So there’s a tradeoff there we all need to understand.”

Bryce Clemmer, who runs the Vadio service, which helps monetize music videos, says the data is already out there. “I’m not afraid of it. It already knows what I buy.” He would be concerned, however, if the speaker started listening in on conversations about politics or healthcare. “Because that’s information that could be used against anyone.”

We've reached out to Amazon and Google for comment.

Also on the #Talking Tech Roundtable this week:

--Aubrey Cattell introduces Spark, a new free software suite from the imaging powerhouse that brings the power of high-end software like Photoshop and Illustrator to the masses, to pretty up images for blogs and websites with text and create animated videos from your photos. The suite is intended to be Adobe’s take on Google Docs, but for imaging, and also has a companion IOS app.

--Person of Interest executive producers Nolan and Greg Plageman talk about the show’s pending finale, and why the long fascination with the snooping side of technology.

Follow USA TODAY tech columnist and #TalkingTech host Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham and listen to #TalkingTech on Google Play, Stitcher, iTunes, TuneIn and SoundCloud.