5 ms·

Seems like a pretty big stretch...

bisby 8y ago
I mean, if this was a one in a million chance of happening, and there have been billions of conversations happening near devices like these, I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. If you have an echo and it kicks on unexpectedly, you can go to the app to see what it thought you said, along with a recording of you saying it. I've had "alright, uhh..." trigger it. and on the grainy bad across the room recording, I could see how the computer thought it was "Alexa". So I could see how if the computer is purposefully listening for "right" or "yes" that it could mistake any number of other words for that. I would much prefer an open source + open hardware alternative that works reliably, but I received an Echo dot as a gift, so after a few months of debating, I plugged it in. Having an always listening internet connected device that has access to your contact list is a pretty big stretch. But somehow we go along with that just fine.
- jacobsenscott 8y ago
  Given the numbers it has almost certainly happened at least hundreds of times and probably thousands of times. But the remaining sequence of events - the receiver notifies the sender, and a media outlet picks it up, and amazon comments seems to have only happened once so far.
acdha 8y ago
After using these systems I think it's plausible: the current ML systems produce valid but incorrect words frequently and since the UI is designed for marketing rather than usability nobody wants to expose low confidence levels or a correction UI. They have enough customers that someone was bound to get a false positive which the system mapped to one of a few constrained choices in a brittle interface tree. As an example, I've noticed that Siri tends to default to offering to open Notes on my iPhone any time it fails to recognize a query correctly. Alexa on the FireTV is better but still has lots of failure modes which look suspiciously like the default branch of a switch statement where it ends up really off on a common query in a quiet room.

I mean, if this was a one in a million chance of happening, and there have been billions of conversations happening near devices like these, I'm surprised this hasn't happened more often. If you have an echo and it kicks on unexpectedly, you can go to the app to see what it thought you said, along with a recording of you saying it. I've had "alright, uhh..." trigger it. and on the grainy bad across the room recording, I could see how the computer thought it was "Alexa". So I could see how if the computer is purposefully listening for "right" or "yes" that it could mistake any number of other words for that. I would much prefer an open source + open hardware alternative that works reliably, but I received an Echo dot as a gift, so after a few months of debating, I plugged it in. Having an always listening internet connected device that has access to your contact list is a pretty big stretch. But somehow we go along with that just fine.

jacobsenscott 8y ago
Given the numbers it has almost certainly happened at least hundreds of times and probably thousands of times. But the remaining sequence of events - the receiver notifies the sender, and a media outlet picks it up, and amazon comments seems to have only happened once so far.

acdha 8y ago

After using these systems I think it's plausible: the current ML systems produce valid but incorrect words frequently and since the UI is designed for marketing rather than usability nobody wants to expose low confidence levels or a correction UI. They have enough customers that someone was bound to get a false positive which the system mapped to one of a few constrained choices in a brittle interface tree. As an example, I've noticed that Siri tends to default to offering to open Notes on my iPhone any time it fails to recognize a query correctly. Alexa on the FireTV is better but still has lots of failure modes which look suspiciously like the default branch of a switch statement where it ends up really off on a common query in a quiet room.