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Burger King ‘O.K. Google’ Ad Doesn’t Seem O.K. With Google

121 points by aaron_p 10y ago

11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
It is clever? Is it intrusive? No. It's Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
- afandian 10y ago
  Which bit? (Agreed it's all becoming a bit surreal)
dandare 10y ago
I don't live in the US and I never saw an ad for Alexa or G Home - and I have a problem understanding how can they be useful beyond a fancy gimmick. Can you seriously trust it with your pizza order even if you don't know what the menu is and what you want? Then how many times a week do you order a pizza? Maybe I it is just me being old, please educate me.
- disgusting_guy 10y ago
  In the kitchen they are particularly useful, or any time you don't have your hands free: "Alexa, play some soft rock" "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes" "Alexa, skip this track" "Alexa, how long do I boil an egg for"
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  A friend of mine has an Alexa, and I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be able to say "Alexa, play <some song>" and have it just happen. The marketers far overstate its significance, like marketers do, but it is a handy little gizmo to have around.
  - eddieroger 10y ago
    So far, the best combination of neat and useful for me has been integration with Logitech Harmony and having Alexa start turning stuff on while I approach the couch. It feels so futuristic to be able to shout in to the air that I would like to watch some TV or play a game and have all that stuff just come up for me. If I spent more time with it, I could probably even get it turning to specific channels or launching Rocket League automatically. I tried doing the normal shopping list routine with it, or asking it to set timers, but none of that has really stuck in the same way that "Alexa, turn on AppleTV has." I do like her sense of humor though, and "tell me a joke" is a mainstay.
  - j_s 10y ago
    Twitch streamers do this sometimes, and it's usually purposely choosing an annoying song.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      I like to use it for situationally-appropriate accompaniment. Just won a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'We Are the Champions'." Just lost a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It'." :)
- amelius 10y ago
  Also, who pays if by accident it orders 1000 pizzas?
  - NKCSS 10y ago
    What pizza delivery place would actually try to deliver 1000 pizza's?
    - mfukar 10y ago
      Fine, 10. Your $20 order just became $200.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Any pizza place in a city where it’s common that a school or a professor would order hundreds of pizzas. Our high school, due to having no cafeteria for a while, ordered once or twice a week hundreds of pizzas from several pizza places. And we have a professor at our university who always promises to give everyone free pizza if more than 25% of the class are still there the week before the exam. Sometimes it works, sometimes too many fail. But ordering many pizzas, especially online, is possible. Although some places will call you back to confirm
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      In college I worked a pizza joint. 300 pizza orders were not uncommon, but anything over 200 dollars got a callback to make sure it was legit. But hey, if the card clears, noone cares.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Easily solved, though, by adding additional confirmation steps if the amounts are above a certain level or the order deviates from your usual patterns. I look forward to giving Star Trek type authorization codes when ordering pizzas...
- Negitivefrags 10y ago
  My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to play while their food gets cold. After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday. One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"
  - danieldk 10y ago
    One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  You clearly have the wrong mindset; it's not about what the device can do for you, it's about what you can to for the company operating the device.
  - delegate 10y ago
    Beautiful !
- buserror 10y ago
  I love mine(s) now. I made a bridge between my RF wall switches [0], outlets and so on and I can turn things on/off using Alexa. The best is at night before going to bed, I can say 'Alexa, turn off downstairs' and that will turn off all lights, lamps, speakers, amplifiers. But yes, I can also tell her to play some music thru the speakers, and 'Alexa, turn on speakers' and the music automagically starts playing on the stereo. Then there's all the other bits, but the timers we use really all the time, the 'Alexa, what's up' in the morning is pretty nice too... [0]: https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge
- bargl 10y ago
  I have alexa and we use it CONSTANTLY as a timer for our kid. You have 2 minutes in timeout. Boom alexa does it. I can take him to timeout and get that started at the same time. It also makes it so that I'm not saying when he gets out but a device is saying when he gets out. He doesn't tend to argue with Alexa but he will argue (negotiate) with me so it helps in that way. I also use it to play music and read books to me. In the future I'm going to set it up to work with my smart home, but I haven't set that up because we're selling our house. Was it worth the price point? No, but now that I have it it's become part of my daily life.
  - dmix 10y ago
    That's quite a brilliant use case. This is why I believe chat bots and by proxy voice assistants like this will be standard technology, despite the risks (having an always on microphone is not entirely necessary). There are probably thousands of these niche use cases that we haven't thought of because these are new interface form factors. Tons of opportunity for innovation/products here. The only downside (besides the need for server voice processing) is that you are building a company on a platform. The whole Twitter and Facebook platform debacles showed the risks of trusting your business life support to a bigger indifferent company - who may just steal your idea and implement it.
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tmd83 10y ago
I like the fact the ad managed to show the potential unwanted side affect of such device in a manner that everyone understand. I do see the appeal of smart devices and it has to start somewhere and all such start would be painful. But with the issues of IoT, the rampant ignoring of privacy by big corp and govt. alike, the lack of understanding of potential impact by even the knowledgeable, the apathy of the masses makes it a very dangerous time for some of these innovations.
- dovdovdov 10y ago
  PSAd :)
- evanb 10y ago
  "Alexa, set an alarm for three o'clock in the morning."
  - geon 10y ago
    Alexa, buy me a dollhouse. http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-news-anchor-order-dollhouse http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-...
  - dharbin 10y ago
    "O.k. Google, execute order 66"
  - skolos 10y ago
    My kid wanted a fitness watch for Christmas. One morning I received bunch of emails about purchases on Amazon, but I was too busy to look and I knew that it was probably my wife Christmas shopping. In the evening I had a chance to look at the emails - 6 orders of watches $175 each. I had time to cancel all but one. So my kid got black watch for Christmas, even though he wanted blue. At least size was correct. Amazon should not have switched Alexa purchasing on by default.
    - bfuller 10y ago
      maybe your kid is more clever than you expected
lolc 10y ago
I laughed. Who watches burger ads and has a Google Listening Device installed? By the time this shit becomes useful, it will be able to recognize my voice, like any good servant. And it will not be tethered to the cloud.
- lithos 10y ago
  No company will give up an information vacuum in a busy living space. And if a company did they would just get acquired by a company that would change the software and TOS to become an information vacuum.
  - lolc 10y ago
    What do you mean by information vacuum?
    - fixermark 10y ago
      A device designed to passively harvest as much information as it can.
      - lolc 10y ago
        Ah ok. Yes it's our job to let these companies go out of business.
        fixermark 10y ago
        Interesting. Why?
        lolc 10y ago
        Because it's an invasion of privacy.
- autotypo 10y ago
  Almost everyone in a bus station waiting area with 24/7 TV/wifi, for example.
tajen 10y ago
They could have gone for "Hey Siri", but did they study junk food consumers as Android users? http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-maps-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma... It's sad that Google just deactivated the phrase. There's so much potential in playing with device-originated communications: - Siri and Google could work together a script to detect each other (usually setup by users who want fun) and start an actual discussion, perhaps from a movie, a comedy, etc. Bam! Movie advertising, and the surprise effect makes people share it virally. - TV ads-triggered events could generate a health discussion next time the person goes to Burger King, or detect friends who were triggered at exactly the same time and suggest to start a convo about this particular TV show. Would be fun if watching TV became a social experience thanks to Android or Alexa. At that point, instead of being triggered and filtering out wrong occurrences, they could build something upon it.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > They could have gone for "Hey Siri", but did they study junk food consumers as Android users? http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma.. http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma.... Or maybe because they planned to expand the campaign globally (as they often do with their ad campaigns), and Android happens to be by far more successful globally?
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  Worth pointing out that the always-on `Hey Siri` on iPhones is trained and responds only to the trainer's voice.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    The Norwegian submission to the Montreux comedy festival in 1983 [1] had as a plot point how one of the characters got locked out of his flat because he had a cold that changed his voice enough that it wasn't recognised by his building security system. It'll take a long time before we have all of the kinks sorted out... [1] Happy New Century: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983 https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983 (in Norwegian only; it's set on New Years Eve 1999 - it's quite dated)
dandare 10y ago
In my childhood I always imagined the word to active these devices will be simply "Home".
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Childhood-you did not consider the indoctrination effect saying "OK <company>" multiple times a day. -- Sent from my someDevice.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Longer code-phrases actually give the voice recognition system lower probability of false positives and false negatives. Additionally, the code phrase needs to be something slightly obscure right now; you don't want the machine triggering every time you walk through the front door and yell "Honey, I'm home! How was your day?"
cool_shit 10y ago
This is genius. The best ads do their work not in the 15 seconds they play -- but in the lifetime that follows. Well done Burger King, after all -- what good is Google if you can't stand on their shoulders, right?
tobyhinloopen 10y ago
That is awesome and kinda scary
afandian 10y ago
It seems to me Google could easily mitigate against this by fingerprinting the query. If anomalously high levels of the same fingerprint appear at the same time, ignore it.
- 19eightyfour 10y ago
  Google did find some clever way to stop it working. The article says within hours of the commercial being reported on, it had stopped activating the device.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Easy to make an exception for that particular pattern but that doesn't stop someone else from doing this again. The more successful a medium is the bigger the chance that it will be abused for the equivalent of spam. Burger King is acting like those two lawyers that wrote a how to spam guide ('How to make a fortune on the information superhighway').
    - afandian 10y ago
      Don't know what you mean by "that" in your comment, but fingerprinting all requests (which they probably already do) and then looking for elevated rates is surely a generalisable pattern?
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        Good one, the simultaneous hits should trigger a block. Hadn't thought it through.
        afandian 10y ago
        Makes you wonder what else they could do (in theory). cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
    - 10y ago
_pmf_ 10y ago
Oh boy. But of course, autonomous driving AI will turn out just fine, right!
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  "All right _pmf_, I'm turning right!"
klez 10y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182
19eightyfour 10y ago
I think this is totally fine by Google. "O.K. Google" would be a trade or service mark of Google, and you'd need to obtain permission in order to use this mark in an advertisement. The way the ad depicts BK and Google "working together", to speak a favourable description of a BK product, suggests some sort of Google endorsement for BK. Without that endorsement being approved, it's right that Google would act to stop the ad from suggesting or using an endorsement. From my point of view, this is pretty risky for BK to do so. And either they didn't understand the risks, or they knew the repercussion would not be expensive for them, or they just decided to take the risk. To give BK the benefit of the doubt from a strategic perspective, maybe the thinking was, "We know Google will react negatively or shut it down, but that reaction will also get coverage, and will promote talk of our ad even further. Thanks Google!" Still, I'm not marketing person, but that type of thinking, seems to me sort of like "poke the bear" for benefit, and seems quite bizarre to me. I feel it's strange if that is really how marketing people calculate.
- kuschku 10y ago
  The interesting question is if "Google" is even still a trademark of Google. Considering many dictionaries list it as "to google: to search in the internet with a search engine, e.g. Google® or Bing®", one could argue it has become generic, and the invocation isn’t actually "O.K. Google: ", but "OK, google: ", using it as imperative form of a verb. That said, this argument is today very silly, as it relies on the letter-of-the-law interpretation, and wouldn’t fly in most courts yet. In a few years, with "to google" being used more commonly, it might actually.
  - nix0n 10y ago
    This is something that Google is actively working to prevent, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)#Etymology
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- 10y ago
dualogy 10y ago
Ah well, just go with Cortana then.. =)
NKCSS 10y ago
As soon as they can do good voice fingerprinting and add it to the device, this becomes a non-issue.
nkkollaw 10y ago
I don't know much about this, but when I set Siri up I think it does some voice recognition so that I am the only one who can control the phone. Couldn't the same thing be done with Google and Alexa? During installation, one could add his own voice, and then your command "Google, add this voice" would allow you to add another member of the household.
- pebers 10y ago
  You can, although it seems to be well hidden on recent Android: - Settings - Languages & input - Keyboard and input methods > Virtual keyboard - Google voice typing - "Ok Google" detection There are options in there to train / retrain the voice model by saying "OK Google" to it several times, and then it should respond only to you.
  - nkkollaw 10y ago
    Yes, I would make it like a first-run thing, that you _have_ to do it during setup (like Siri).
- lightedman 10y ago
  "I don't know much about this, but when I set Siri up I think it does some voice recognition so that I am the only one who can control the phone." No, as I can use my fiance's iPhone and our voices are at least a fifth apart in tone, he has a northern accent, I have southern drawl.
  - ZoFreX 10y ago
    Does that work for the hands-free activation? The voice lock on Siri doesn't apply to queries once it's activated, only to the activation itself. E.g. if I say "hey Siri" while my phone has its screen off, it wakes up and waits for a query. If my girlfriend (or anyone else) says a query at this point it will respond to it. But if the screen is off and my girlfriend says "hey Siri", nothing happens.
    - 10y ago
mirimir 10y ago
This is a clever hack, and arguably appeals to a core Burger King demographic. Whether they experienced it themselves, or just read about it. Because it'll get shared and discussed. And the next time you want a burger, maybe ... What's evil, I believe, is that ultrasonic cross-device tracking technology. This was just cute.
- bargl 10y ago
  This 100%. They are OBVIOUSLY using your device from a commercial in a funny way. You know about it. But apparently what we don't know we don't care about when you tell us and we know but we can bury our heads in the sand.
mrmondo 10y ago
I think it's a great move to show the general public how insanely insecure and intrusive the IoT and always-listening cloud devices can be. People brought it to light with google and with amazon - nothing changed and unaware people lapped up the devices, hopefully a demonstration thats more tangible to the general public phones home (pun intended).
auvrw 10y ago
http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-burger-king-in-iron-man-a-disgusting-lifesaver/ http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-burger-k... 汉保王 is, by contrast, wonderful
jasonkostempski 10y ago
Still waiting for a shock jock to say "ok google, show me pictures of naked kids" during the morning rush. People will die scrambling for their phones, but it will finally be the end of this silliness.
- colemannugent 10y ago
  This is the example I use to show people the dangers of these kinds of devices. Every now and then someones device activates while I'm giving the example and all the talk of, "But its so convenient!" dies pretty fast.
bitwize 10y ago
There are radio ads running in Australia or New Zealand (I forget which) that instruct Siri to turn airplane mode on. They are PSAs about texting or dicking with your phone while driving, so I guess they're helpful, but still.
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  That's not helpful in the slightest, people may have passengers or be using their phone for something like GPS.
  - stuaxo 10y ago
    GPS would work, but maps would stop working after a while.
    - MiddleEndian 10y ago
      I guess I mean GPS in the colloquial sense. Stuff like traffic/accident/closure information would also be lost.
- stordoff 10y ago
  I'm not so sure an ad. which encourages you to interact with your phone (to take it back out of flight mode) is going to have the desired effect.
- 19eightyfour 10y ago
  I don't understand why these Telescreen ( ok, teleblock ) technologies don't require voice print access control as default. Voice biometric is older than this cloud voice NLP tech. Also, it's amazing to me that human psychology and the zeigeist requires everyone flip out over Google Glass, but always on microphones linked to the Company, totally fine. Tolerated, in fact, behind the point of inconvenience. The other incongruous observation I want to add is voice is taking off in the home, but people using voice typing and control in public isn't as accepted. There's an essay in this somewhere.
rocky1138 10y ago
> “Most people don’t trust advertising, and having advertisers continually listen to what happens in our homes is scary,” he said. Well then don't buy a fucking microphone that runs 24/7 in your living room, you dolt! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- cryptoz 10y ago
  That doesn't seem like very useful advice. Don't visit any of your friends who have bought it. Don't go out in public. Don't be a part of society. Don't even SMS or email anyone since they might have one too. The fight to reduce surveillance must happen even when the people who are fighting for privacy don't purchase the products that everyone else buys. If 99% of people have bought Google Home in the future, what good does it do to tell someone "hurr durr don't buy it?" No good at all.
  - rboyd 10y ago
    I mean, he has a point. I'm all for fighting for privacy but what good does it do to pretend we're winning? We're losing / already lost.
    - rexpop 10y ago
      Or, perhaps, that is part of the story of submission we're fed as propaganda.
  - electic 10y ago
    This episode is a good learning experience for these people about the dangers of having an all listening microphone in your house. The best thing we can do, is keep educating people. The one thing we can do is create something like UL/Consumer reports for privacy. It is desperately needed. People automatically check this site to see what the exposure is of having a certain device in your home. I hope this comes to pass.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  How is this realistic? Don't buy a cell phone? Don't buy a computer with built in microphone?
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I'm sure most people are okay with it. This is a clever trick. Get over it.
Zenst 10y ago
Firstly, if Google et all, allowed us as users to customise the name of our assistant. That would be appreciated by all users. Alas they do not and no sign they will either anytime soon. Second aspect, they have no voice recognition tied in to these assistants and that would curtail all this. Though not ideal it would be a high improvement from what we have currently. But until we have customisable names for our assistants, voice recognition, then this and much more will carry on happening. Do you have a landline and screen calls, well somebody could ring you up and speak to your assistant currently, that is an issue still. For me I don't see things getting any better until we have the above tied into some additional user biometrics, be that array microphone tracking that is checked with visual recognition of some form. Though a cheap simple solution would be a watch with one button that you pressed and spoke into and that was linked to the assistant. That would not be hard and work much better.

121 points by aaron_p 10y ago

It is clever? Is it intrusive? No. It's Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

afandian 10y ago
Which bit? (Agreed it's all becoming a bit surreal)

dandare 10y ago

I don't live in the US and I never saw an ad for Alexa or G Home - and I have a problem understanding how can they be useful beyond a fancy gimmick. Can you seriously trust it with your pizza order even if you don't know what the menu is and what you want? Then how many times a week do you order a pizza? Maybe I it is just me being old, please educate me.

disgusting_guy 10y ago
In the kitchen they are particularly useful, or any time you don't have your hands free: "Alexa, play some soft rock" "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes" "Alexa, skip this track" "Alexa, how long do I boil an egg for"
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
A friend of mine has an Alexa, and I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be able to say "Alexa, play <some song>" and have it just happen. The marketers far overstate its significance, like marketers do, but it is a handy little gizmo to have around.
- eddieroger 10y ago
  So far, the best combination of neat and useful for me has been integration with Logitech Harmony and having Alexa start turning stuff on while I approach the couch. It feels so futuristic to be able to shout in to the air that I would like to watch some TV or play a game and have all that stuff just come up for me. If I spent more time with it, I could probably even get it turning to specific channels or launching Rocket League automatically. I tried doing the normal shopping list routine with it, or asking it to set timers, but none of that has really stuck in the same way that "Alexa, turn on AppleTV has." I do like her sense of humor though, and "tell me a joke" is a mainstay.
- j_s 10y ago
  Twitch streamers do this sometimes, and it's usually purposely choosing an annoying song.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    I like to use it for situationally-appropriate accompaniment. Just won a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'We Are the Champions'." Just lost a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It'." :)
amelius 10y ago
Also, who pays if by accident it orders 1000 pizzas?
- NKCSS 10y ago
  What pizza delivery place would actually try to deliver 1000 pizza's?
  - mfukar 10y ago
    Fine, 10. Your $20 order just became $200.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Any pizza place in a city where it’s common that a school or a professor would order hundreds of pizzas. Our high school, due to having no cafeteria for a while, ordered once or twice a week hundreds of pizzas from several pizza places. And we have a professor at our university who always promises to give everyone free pizza if more than 25% of the class are still there the week before the exam. Sometimes it works, sometimes too many fail. But ordering many pizzas, especially online, is possible. Although some places will call you back to confirm
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    In college I worked a pizza joint. 300 pizza orders were not uncommon, but anything over 200 dollars got a callback to make sure it was legit. But hey, if the card clears, noone cares.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Easily solved, though, by adding additional confirmation steps if the amounts are above a certain level or the order deviates from your usual patterns. I look forward to giving Star Trek type authorization codes when ordering pizzas...
Negitivefrags 10y ago
My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to play while their food gets cold. After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday. One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"
- danieldk 10y ago
  One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!
_pmf_ 10y ago
You clearly have the wrong mindset; it's not about what the device can do for you, it's about what you can to for the company operating the device.
- delegate 10y ago
  Beautiful !
buserror 10y ago
I love mine(s) now. I made a bridge between my RF wall switches [0], outlets and so on and I can turn things on/off using Alexa. The best is at night before going to bed, I can say 'Alexa, turn off downstairs' and that will turn off all lights, lamps, speakers, amplifiers. But yes, I can also tell her to play some music thru the speakers, and 'Alexa, turn on speakers' and the music automagically starts playing on the stereo. Then there's all the other bits, but the timers we use really all the time, the 'Alexa, what's up' in the morning is pretty nice too... [0]: https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge
bargl 10y ago
I have alexa and we use it CONSTANTLY as a timer for our kid. You have 2 minutes in timeout. Boom alexa does it. I can take him to timeout and get that started at the same time. It also makes it so that I'm not saying when he gets out but a device is saying when he gets out. He doesn't tend to argue with Alexa but he will argue (negotiate) with me so it helps in that way. I also use it to play music and read books to me. In the future I'm going to set it up to work with my smart home, but I haven't set that up because we're selling our house. Was it worth the price point? No, but now that I have it it's become part of my daily life.
- dmix 10y ago
  That's quite a brilliant use case. This is why I believe chat bots and by proxy voice assistants like this will be standard technology, despite the risks (having an always on microphone is not entirely necessary). There are probably thousands of these niche use cases that we haven't thought of because these are new interface form factors. Tons of opportunity for innovation/products here. The only downside (besides the need for server voice processing) is that you are building a company on a platform. The whole Twitter and Facebook platform debacles showed the risks of trusting your business life support to a bigger indifferent company - who may just steal your idea and implement it.
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tmd83 10y ago

I like the fact the ad managed to show the potential unwanted side affect of such device in a manner that everyone understand. I do see the appeal of smart devices and it has to start somewhere and all such start would be painful. But with the issues of IoT, the rampant ignoring of privacy by big corp and govt. alike, the lack of understanding of potential impact by even the knowledgeable, the apathy of the masses makes it a very dangerous time for some of these innovations.

dovdovdov 10y ago
PSAd :)
evanb 10y ago
"Alexa, set an alarm for three o'clock in the morning."
- geon 10y ago
  Alexa, buy me a dollhouse. http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-news-anchor-order-dollhouse http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-...
- dharbin 10y ago
  "O.k. Google, execute order 66"
- skolos 10y ago
  My kid wanted a fitness watch for Christmas. One morning I received bunch of emails about purchases on Amazon, but I was too busy to look and I knew that it was probably my wife Christmas shopping. In the evening I had a chance to look at the emails - 6 orders of watches $175 each. I had time to cancel all but one. So my kid got black watch for Christmas, even though he wanted blue. At least size was correct. Amazon should not have switched Alexa purchasing on by default.
  - bfuller 10y ago
    maybe your kid is more clever than you expected

lolc 10y ago

I laughed. Who watches burger ads and has a Google Listening Device installed? By the time this shit becomes useful, it will be able to recognize my voice, like any good servant. And it will not be tethered to the cloud.

lithos 10y ago
No company will give up an information vacuum in a busy living space. And if a company did they would just get acquired by a company that would change the software and TOS to become an information vacuum.
- lolc 10y ago
  What do you mean by information vacuum?
  - fixermark 10y ago
    A device designed to passively harvest as much information as it can.
    - lolc 10y ago
      Ah ok. Yes it's our job to let these companies go out of business.
      - fixermark 10y ago
        Interesting. Why?
        lolc 10y ago
        Because it's an invasion of privacy.
autotypo 10y ago
Almost everyone in a bus station waiting area with 24/7 TV/wifi, for example.

tajen 10y ago

They could have gone for "Hey Siri", but did they study junk food consumers as Android users? http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-maps-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma... It's sad that Google just deactivated the phrase. There's so much potential in playing with device-originated communications: - Siri and Google could work together a script to detect each other (usually setup by users who want fun) and start an actual discussion, perhaps from a movie, a comedy, etc. Bam! Movie advertising, and the surprise effect makes people share it virally. - TV ads-triggered events could generate a health discussion next time the person goes to Burger King, or detect friends who were triggered at exactly the same time and suggest to start a convo about this particular TV show. Would be fun if watching TV became a social experience thanks to Android or Alexa. At that point, instead of being triggered and filtering out wrong occurrences, they could build something upon it.

kuschku 10y ago
> They could have gone for "Hey Siri", but did they study junk food consumers as Android users? http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma.. http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma.... Or maybe because they planned to expand the campaign globally (as they often do with their ad campaigns), and Android happens to be by far more successful globally?
matthewmacleod 10y ago
Worth pointing out that the always-on `Hey Siri` on iPhones is trained and responds only to the trainer's voice.
- vidarh 10y ago
  The Norwegian submission to the Montreux comedy festival in 1983 [1] had as a plot point how one of the characters got locked out of his flat because he had a cold that changed his voice enough that it wasn't recognised by his building security system. It'll take a long time before we have all of the kinks sorted out... [1] Happy New Century: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983 https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983 (in Norwegian only; it's set on New Years Eve 1999 - it's quite dated)

dandare 10y ago

In my childhood I always imagined the word to active these devices will be simply "Home".

lucb1e 10y ago
Childhood-you did not consider the indoctrination effect saying "OK <company>" multiple times a day. -- Sent from my someDevice.
fixermark 10y ago
Longer code-phrases actually give the voice recognition system lower probability of false positives and false negatives. Additionally, the code phrase needs to be something slightly obscure right now; you don't want the machine triggering every time you walk through the front door and yell "Honey, I'm home! How was your day?"

cool_shit 10y ago

This is genius. The best ads do their work not in the 15 seconds they play -- but in the lifetime that follows. Well done Burger King, after all -- what good is Google if you can't stand on their shoulders, right?

tobyhinloopen 10y ago

That is awesome and kinda scary

afandian 10y ago

It seems to me Google could easily mitigate against this by fingerprinting the query. If anomalously high levels of the same fingerprint appear at the same time, ignore it.

19eightyfour 10y ago
Google did find some clever way to stop it working. The article says within hours of the commercial being reported on, it had stopped activating the device.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Easy to make an exception for that particular pattern but that doesn't stop someone else from doing this again. The more successful a medium is the bigger the chance that it will be abused for the equivalent of spam. Burger King is acting like those two lawyers that wrote a how to spam guide ('How to make a fortune on the information superhighway').
  - afandian 10y ago
    Don't know what you mean by "that" in your comment, but fingerprinting all requests (which they probably already do) and then looking for elevated rates is surely a generalisable pattern?
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Good one, the simultaneous hits should trigger a block. Hadn't thought it through.
      - afandian 10y ago
        Makes you wonder what else they could do (in theory). cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
  - 10y ago

_pmf_ 10y ago

Oh boy. But of course, autonomous driving AI will turn out just fine, right!

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
"All right _pmf_, I'm turning right!"

klez 10y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182

19eightyfour 10y ago

I think this is totally fine by Google. "O.K. Google" would be a trade or service mark of Google, and you'd need to obtain permission in order to use this mark in an advertisement. The way the ad depicts BK and Google "working together", to speak a favourable description of a BK product, suggests some sort of Google endorsement for BK. Without that endorsement being approved, it's right that Google would act to stop the ad from suggesting or using an endorsement. From my point of view, this is pretty risky for BK to do so. And either they didn't understand the risks, or they knew the repercussion would not be expensive for them, or they just decided to take the risk. To give BK the benefit of the doubt from a strategic perspective, maybe the thinking was, "We know Google will react negatively or shut it down, but that reaction will also get coverage, and will promote talk of our ad even further. Thanks Google!" Still, I'm not marketing person, but that type of thinking, seems to me sort of like "poke the bear" for benefit, and seems quite bizarre to me. I feel it's strange if that is really how marketing people calculate.

kuschku 10y ago
The interesting question is if "Google" is even still a trademark of Google. Considering many dictionaries list it as "to google: to search in the internet with a search engine, e.g. Google® or Bing®", one could argue it has become generic, and the invocation isn’t actually "O.K. Google: ", but "OK, google: ", using it as imperative form of a verb. That said, this argument is today very silly, as it relies on the letter-of-the-law interpretation, and wouldn’t fly in most courts yet. In a few years, with "to google" being used more commonly, it might actually.
- nix0n 10y ago
  This is something that Google is actively working to prevent, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)#Etymology
  - deleted 10y ago
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dualogy 10y ago

Ah well, just go with Cortana then.. =)

NKCSS 10y ago

As soon as they can do good voice fingerprinting and add it to the device, this becomes a non-issue.

nkkollaw 10y ago

I don't know much about this, but when I set Siri up I think it does some voice recognition so that I am the only one who can control the phone. Couldn't the same thing be done with Google and Alexa? During installation, one could add his own voice, and then your command "Google, add this voice" would allow you to add another member of the household.

pebers 10y ago
You can, although it seems to be well hidden on recent Android: - Settings - Languages & input - Keyboard and input methods > Virtual keyboard - Google voice typing - "Ok Google" detection There are options in there to train / retrain the voice model by saying "OK Google" to it several times, and then it should respond only to you.
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  Yes, I would make it like a first-run thing, that you _have_ to do it during setup (like Siri).
lightedman 10y ago
"I don't know much about this, but when I set Siri up I think it does some voice recognition so that I am the only one who can control the phone." No, as I can use my fiance's iPhone and our voices are at least a fifth apart in tone, he has a northern accent, I have southern drawl.
- ZoFreX 10y ago
  Does that work for the hands-free activation? The voice lock on Siri doesn't apply to queries once it's activated, only to the activation itself. E.g. if I say "hey Siri" while my phone has its screen off, it wakes up and waits for a query. If my girlfriend (or anyone else) says a query at this point it will respond to it. But if the screen is off and my girlfriend says "hey Siri", nothing happens.
  - 10y ago

mirimir 10y ago

This is a clever hack, and arguably appeals to a core Burger King demographic. Whether they experienced it themselves, or just read about it. Because it'll get shared and discussed. And the next time you want a burger, maybe ... What's evil, I believe, is that ultrasonic cross-device tracking technology. This was just cute.

bargl 10y ago
This 100%. They are OBVIOUSLY using your device from a commercial in a funny way. You know about it. But apparently what we don't know we don't care about when you tell us and we know but we can bury our heads in the sand.

mrmondo 10y ago

I think it's a great move to show the general public how insanely insecure and intrusive the IoT and always-listening cloud devices can be. People brought it to light with google and with amazon - nothing changed and unaware people lapped up the devices, hopefully a demonstration thats more tangible to the general public phones home (pun intended).

auvrw 10y ago

http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-burger-king-in-iron-man-a-disgusting-lifesaver/ http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-burger-k... 汉保王 is, by contrast, wonderful

jasonkostempski 10y ago

Still waiting for a shock jock to say "ok google, show me pictures of naked kids" during the morning rush. People will die scrambling for their phones, but it will finally be the end of this silliness.

colemannugent 10y ago
This is the example I use to show people the dangers of these kinds of devices. Every now and then someones device activates while I'm giving the example and all the talk of, "But its so convenient!" dies pretty fast.

bitwize 10y ago

There are radio ads running in Australia or New Zealand (I forget which) that instruct Siri to turn airplane mode on. They are PSAs about texting or dicking with your phone while driving, so I guess they're helpful, but still.

MiddleEndian 10y ago
That's not helpful in the slightest, people may have passengers or be using their phone for something like GPS.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  GPS would work, but maps would stop working after a while.
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    I guess I mean GPS in the colloquial sense. Stuff like traffic/accident/closure information would also be lost.
stordoff 10y ago
I'm not so sure an ad. which encourages you to interact with your phone (to take it back out of flight mode) is going to have the desired effect.
19eightyfour 10y ago
I don't understand why these Telescreen ( ok, teleblock ) technologies don't require voice print access control as default. Voice biometric is older than this cloud voice NLP tech. Also, it's amazing to me that human psychology and the zeigeist requires everyone flip out over Google Glass, but always on microphones linked to the Company, totally fine. Tolerated, in fact, behind the point of inconvenience. The other incongruous observation I want to add is voice is taking off in the home, but people using voice typing and control in public isn't as accepted. There's an essay in this somewhere.

rocky1138 10y ago

> “Most people don’t trust advertising, and having advertisers continually listen to what happens in our homes is scary,” he said. Well then don't buy a fucking microphone that runs 24/7 in your living room, you dolt! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

cryptoz 10y ago
That doesn't seem like very useful advice. Don't visit any of your friends who have bought it. Don't go out in public. Don't be a part of society. Don't even SMS or email anyone since they might have one too. The fight to reduce surveillance must happen even when the people who are fighting for privacy don't purchase the products that everyone else buys. If 99% of people have bought Google Home in the future, what good does it do to tell someone "hurr durr don't buy it?" No good at all.
- rboyd 10y ago
  I mean, he has a point. I'm all for fighting for privacy but what good does it do to pretend we're winning? We're losing / already lost.
  - rexpop 10y ago
    Or, perhaps, that is part of the story of submission we're fed as propaganda.
- electic 10y ago
  This episode is a good learning experience for these people about the dangers of having an all listening microphone in your house. The best thing we can do, is keep educating people. The one thing we can do is create something like UL/Consumer reports for privacy. It is desperately needed. People automatically check this site to see what the exposure is of having a certain device in your home. I hope this comes to pass.
eanzenberg 10y ago
How is this realistic? Don't buy a cell phone? Don't buy a computer with built in microphone?

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I'm sure most people are okay with it. This is a clever trick. Get over it.

Zenst 10y ago

Firstly, if Google et all, allowed us as users to customise the name of our assistant. That would be appreciated by all users. Alas they do not and no sign they will either anytime soon. Second aspect, they have no voice recognition tied in to these assistants and that would curtail all this. Though not ideal it would be a high improvement from what we have currently. But until we have customisable names for our assistants, voice recognition, then this and much more will carry on happening. Do you have a landline and screen calls, well somebody could ring you up and speak to your assistant currently, that is an issue still. For me I don't see things getting any better until we have the above tied into some additional user biometrics, be that array microphone tracking that is checked with visual recognition of some form. Though a cheap simple solution would be a watch with one button that you pressed and spoke into and that was linked to the assistant. That would not be hard and work much better.