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Isn't there an inaudible tone that you can use to disable the assistant? I recall reading somewhere that Amazon used it in their commercials for Alexa so that
by coleca 8y ago
Isn't there an inaudible tone that you can use to disable the assistant? I recall reading somewhere that Amazon used it in their commercials for Alexa so that everyone's Echos weren't lighting up during the commercials. I know when a commercial for the Echo comes on and the voices repeat "Alexa, do X" the Echo I have near the TV speaker doesn't light up.
- adambowles 8y agoIf I recall correctly, the adverts omit a certain frequency range from the assistant's invocation phrase which human's won't notice is missing Edit: Yep, omit / reduce tones in the 3000 - 6000 Hz range https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5oer2u/i_may_have_found_how_amazon_prevents_the_echo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5oer2u/i_may_ha...
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoWhich makes WAY more sense than a range outside of human hearing that OP implicated ("inaudible"). Expecting TV's to play tones outside the range people can hear is ridiculous.
- shawn 8y ago"Inaudible" doesn't necessarily mean a range outside of human hearing. For example you could embed a 6kHz tone in a way that's inaudible to humans due to the other frequencies in the waveform.
- sideshowb 8y agoAnd promptly lose it to lossy compression
- jimrandomh 8y agoTV channels already contain inaudible-sound identifiers. Nielsen has people put listeners in their homes, and uses the identifiers to track which channels are getting played.
- buro9 8y agoEr... holy shit to the thought that (Alexa|Assistant|Siri) + Neilsen (or just by Google) could monitor advert viewing in millions of homes.
- taneq 8y agoI thought a few apps had been discovered over the years that fingerprinted TV ads played near the phone and reported them? https://www.howtogeek.com/338409/hundreds-of-smartphone-apps-are-spying-on-your-tv-watching.-heres-how-to-disable-them/ https://www.howtogeek.com/338409/hundreds-of-smartphone-apps...
- jsjohnst 8y agoTo scare you further, multiple brands and models of “SmartTVs” have the ability to fingerprint what is displayed on the screen and report back to a cloud service. Said services are also, not surprisingly, poorly secured.
- jedberg 8y ago> and uses the identifiers to track which channels are getting played. I don't think they're using infrasound for that. I think they use a technology similar to Shazam where it just analyzes the sound to determine what's on.
- amitparikh 8y agoThey are, it's one of the reasons they [Nielsen] bought Arbitron back in 2013. The PPM devices use low-frequency tones encoded into the audio stream at the time of broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter
- jdietrich 8y agoYou can't count on a TV being able to reproduce sounds below about 100Hz or above about 16kHz. The position of the speakers on the back of the TV means you're likely to get a lot of weird phase effects and many TVs have quite heavy audio DSP to compensate for the inadequacy of their speakers. Any hidden signals will need to be in-band and low bit rate with a high level of redundancy.
- derefr 8y agoInterestingly, though, if psychoacoustic compression was used in when reuploading a video, that 3000-6000Hz range might actually be restored—it’s less information if it’s there than if it’s not. Similarly, if the video is heard through a phone line, the call might be using a symbolic voice codec, which would also restore the range (in the sense that it’s not even storing sound, just phonemes.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]