This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too.<p>> The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Wow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".
What's really great about this is that it's a joke on the future that's been predicted so many times already, my favorite of which being the last vignette on Disney's Carousel of Progress. The future family is talking about points in a video game, and the oven hears it and turns the temperature way up, ruining another family Christmas dinner - the joke being that this convenience was finally going to make Dad able to not ruin dinner.
Somewhat related story: me and some coworkers were talking in a room where someone had a Windows 10 laptop being used to present some data. We were talking as usual when the laptop suddenly decides to open a browser to a Bing search with what looked like a few (badly) voice-recognised words of our conversation. That was a rather awkward moment, given that we were discussing some extremely confidential information, and not helped by the "did someone say 'Hey Cortana'?" the laptop's owner promptly blurted out. If I remember correctly, none of us said anything that sounded remotely like that phrase, yet it activated.<p>It's now company policy that built-in microphones have to be disabled, and only external ones are allowed to be used when necessary.
Am I reading this correctly? Amazon essentially built a better integrated version of "The Clapper" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8-G8EoWOw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8-G8EoWOw</a>
I think they need to pick a different name. 'Alexa' is <i>very</i> easy to trigger with other names, and reliably activates when I am watching any show with a character named 'Alex', 'Alexy', etc.<p>One side effect I've noticed is that they seem to have tried to account for it, which has made the Echo less responsive to actual requests; a few times I've stood in front of it yelling 'ALEXA' trying to get it to stop and it does not respond.
Interestingly, the same thing happened about 2 years ago with the Xbox One: <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/13/kinect_voice_commands_for_xbox_in_a_commercial_featuring_actor_aaron_paul.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/13/kinect_vo...</a>
This happens to me with Siri and podcasts - I listen to podcasts in my car, through my iPhone. Occasionally what people say will sound close enough to "Hey, Siri" that it stops the podcasts and and answers whatever question it could extract from the talking following what it thought was "Hey, Siri".<p>It's repeatable, too. One time it happened right as I was parking, on an episode of This American Life. (Or Serial. Or Planet Money. Yeah, yeah, I listen to a lot of NPR shows.) So I kept rewinding back over that part, and it kept triggering Siri.
"Alexa" also responds to her own commercials. [0] [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commercials_activate_alexa/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commerci...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that-amazon-echo-is-responding-to-ads-on-tv" rel="nofollow">http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that...</a>
I had the wake-word on mine set to "Amazon" and then made the mistake of watching an online training video for AWS....<p>Had to stop it and change the wake word back to "Alexa".
I had something similar happen watching Battlestar Galactica on my Xbox and Kinect a few years back.<p>The show went through the opening sequence, then announced "Previously on Battlestar Galactica" at which point the xbox rewound back to the beginning of the show.
It reminds me of the Toyota radio ad that would place iOS into airplane mode.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869797" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869797</a>
I guess I must be from the wrong generation, because <i>none</i> of these voice-activated products make any sense to me whatsoever. I really just can't see the point.
I had a pretty funny story a few months ago. I was watching San Andreas and there is one part where Paul Giamatti (Dr. Lawrence Hayes) yells "ALEXI..." and sure enough Amazon Echo turns on. I had to stop the movie and turn the Echo off because the it subsequently tired to process everything the movie was saying after the trigger word.
I was on a PS4 launch title. We seriously considered writing things like "Xbox Off" into the script. Also that "Alexa buy me a motorcycle" commercial supposedly triggers it all the time.
For most voice control applications, trigger words are enough to reliably detect owner intent, but it seems Echo needs a better mechanism. Maybe adding cameras and looking for eye contact would work?
listening to XM radio, they frequently have station identification announcements.<p>"Siri us xm..."<p>with the iphone plugged in to charge while driving to work hilarity ensues as it cuts out the audio to speak of whatever it thinks was asked.