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Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

100 points by xuaihua 4y ago

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
This makes me wonder, has anyone found a buffer overflow in the Alexa cue? Meaning that by activating Alexa with the right audio you make the audio processor crash?
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Wow. That's a thought. And if you can make it crash, then you can maybe make it run shellcode instead...
  - dylan604 4y ago
    do you then have to tell it elle ess space slash var slash log?
xuaihua 4y ago
An older article, and specifically about their Super Bowl ads, but a fascinating answer to a question I had directly from the source at Amazon.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  For anyone who's curious, it's typical for Alexa to respond to pre-recorded mentions of her name. Last night, ours woke to "Alex" while watching The Traitors. (Speaking of being intrusive, lately Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities to the point that my kids asked me to fire her. It's looking like Siri + Homebridge will allow me to do that.)
  - chasd00 4y ago
    > Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities I was wondering it that was just me, it seems a lot of responses are now ending with "...by the way, did you know i can...". I sometimes listen to NPR ( please don't judge ) and i get the "...we still don't have your zip code..." a lot but i think that is an NPR thing and not an Alexa thing.
    - delecti 4y ago
      It's definitely not just you. I use the "Good Morning" skill nearly daily (which responds with a joke or a little fact about the date), and about 1/3 of the time, before the actual response, she'll interrupt to ask that I setup voice recognition so she knows my name.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    While I heartily recommend you to explore other options, there's a solution to that infuriating behaviour: https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895 https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      Thanks! I found it a few messages down: "Alexa, stop 'By The Way'" Alexa will then reply, "I will snooze my suggestions…for now." (The foreboding pause was implied.)
      - minutillo 4y ago
        And the suggestions will restart in a few days. What we did is add "stop by the way" as a custom command to our "goodnight" routine, so the thing is reminded every single night that these suggestions are unwelcome. The annoyance maximization team at amazon hasn't deployed countermeasures to this yet.
      - scubbo 4y ago
        Haha, yeah, not a fan of that :( anecdotally, they haven't restarted for me yet (activated it ~6 months ago), but I really wish there was a permanent option.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danpalmer 4y ago
I wonder if there's a way to identify audio from speakers. IT might not work for higher end speakers or lower end microphones, but I'm sure the limited frequency range from speakers, and perhaps artifacts of audio compression that might not be noticeable to humans, would identify non-human audio. I've seen a similar approach used for visuals, separating an image at the point of recording based on the type of light source – artificial light having different properties to natural light.
- jmole 4y ago
  Not for consumer level devices. There’s an inherent tradeoff between false positives and true recognition rate. If you make the wrong choice, it means the device doesn’t respond when you say the wake word. There’s nothing that infuriates users more than having to say it again and again to get a response: “Alexa. Alexa! ALEXA!!”
  - muted_sorts 4y ago
    [dead]
- remram 4y ago
  It always seems like my cat can tell what's from a speaker and what's real. My wife calling to the cat over the phone never triggers any reaction, and the cat will often jump out because of a little noise in the kitchen or outside even though a movie is playing. I don't know how much of that is directionality and how much is the sound itself. Cats probably hear different frequencies than humans, but as you point out it wouldn't be too hard to make smart devices' microphones sensitive to those frequencies that our devices' speakers don't emit correctly (because humans don't hear them).
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Interestingly, this was true for my cat until we tried with a device with beamforming - a homepod. It will convince her there is a bird/cat/thing in the room.
  - 4y ago
bitwize 4y ago
This reminds me of a PSA about texting and driving that aired on the radio in some parts of the USA (or maybe Canada?) a few years back. At the end, the announcer says: "Hey Siri, go into airplane mode."
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  That sounds like a recipe for causing _more_ accidents as a lot of people are forced to take their eyes off the road to fix their phone; all at the same time.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    And losing their GPS to boot
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Airplane mode AFAIK (and seems to be confirmed online and in my own experience) does not disable GPS.
      - bitwize 4y ago
        Acquiring location via GPS does not require transmitting over the radio, so that alone may well not be affected by airplane mode. However, most map apps download street map info through the network and cache it for unspecified amounts of time, so unless you use OsmAnd or something, you may lose map data and turn-by-turn navigation.
      - philwelch 4y ago
        GPS itself, no, but phones will pick up geolocation data through cell towers and most turn-by-turn directions use data connections. Though I've never driven in airplane mode so I don't know how well it actually works.
tyoma 4y ago
My echo dot repeatedly self-commands during Amazon Story Time, which was hilarious at first but is now kind of frustrating.
atkailash 4y ago
Ok but why she respond still responds to Michael from the TV but not echo when I’m yelling at it the third time trying to set a timer. There’s a reason I’ve switched almost exclusively to Siri.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  I've been amazed at how rough the flows are around timers. Its a pretty basic piece of functionality, but even something as simple as cancelling them does not work reliably.
  - atkailash 4y ago
    [dead]
- jcutrell 4y ago
  Today I asked Siri what the temperature was this morning. It told me it doesn’t have access to past weather information. Siri has been available for 12 years… I cannot understand why it hasn’t leaped forward more than it has. Embarrassingly low level of progress IMO, though for some things it still remains best in class.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    I know it's probably not fair, yet, but tools like ChatGPT show where Siri et al could end up with the right engineering and product design. It's almost spooky how well ChatGPT understands my queries. (Granted, I don't think the understanding is necessarily related to GPT itself.)
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    Has anyone seen a change log for Siri or a roadmap for future features? I feel as if the functionality is almost the same as it was on release with a nicer sounding voice today.
  - atkailash 4y ago
    [dead]
blowski 4y ago
My friend has an Alexa. It's not an unusual for it to suddenly respond to something happening elsewhere in the kitchen, like a YouTube video on a laptop.
yftsui 4y ago
Isn’t this just a fix after Jimmy Kimmel’s prank ordered $500 worth of swimming noodles for most Alexa users back in 2017? https://youtu.be/hdDBKxJSAHQ https://youtu.be/hdDBKxJSAHQ (Starting around 6:40 mark is the 10 unit order)
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Our Alexa responds to more than just her name including on TV which is amusing and kinda annoying at once.
EGreg 4y ago
I thought that these voice assistants were keyed to people’s individual voices, and their characteristics. Like what VALL-E clones
- vidarh 4y ago
  Alexa/Echo devices at least can recognise voice. If you ask "Alexa, who am I?" it will try to tell you who it heard. To learn a new person you can go "Alexa, learn my voice" (I have no idea to what extent it uses this - e.g. I'd love for it to know that when it recognises my girlfriend, it should apply her music preferences from her profile on my account, but if it does it's by no means obvious). It specifically seems to recognise the voice based on the wake word - my son an I tested this by having one of us say "Alexa" and then the other saying "who am I?", and it'd consistently give the name of the person who said "Alexa".
  - jsmith45 4y ago
    One use I've seen of it knowing who is talking is that it can attribute items added to a shopping or todo (or other) list with the name of the person who added it. Beyond that, I'm not at all sure what scenarios it uses that data for.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Can we find an open source package that can analyze audio from a podcast with multiple people and determine who is speaking in a given second?
EGreg 4y ago
Is there an open source software that can identify who is speaking, not just what is being said, based on some small training based on voice?
jorvi 4y ago
Meanwhile, I’ve had to disable ‘Hey, Siri’ on my iPhone because it’ll trigger at least 4-5 times a day during normal conversations. No my name is not anything close to Siri. No, I didn’t train ‘Hey, Siri’ in a noisy environment. All I could possibly give for a reason is that I have a deep sonorous voice.
- dangrie158 4y ago
  Well my dog is called Lizzy. That’s apparently close enough. The first times I freaked out a bit when a voice answered to something I said to my dog when I was alone at home
- leokennis 4y ago
  Siri is triggered by so many words and phrases. Serious. Basically. Make sure it. Series. The worst part is that when it’s triggered, it refuses to shut up and be canceled. Siri is the laughing stock of the “AI assistants” space.
  - geenew 4y ago
    To be fair, you have to say 'hey' before any of those. There aren't many times in normal conversation when one would say 'Hey serious', or 'Hey series'.
    - leokennis 4y ago
      You’d think an explicit “hey” was needed, but my daily experience makes clear that any sequence of sound even vaguely approximating something remotely sounding like “hey siri” will trigger Siri.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Google's assistant ain't better. Every few days something random will make it trigger on my or my wife's phone. Every time my mom visits, something ends up triggering it on her phone. Google must have made an update or something, because all those false positives started suddenly a few months back. The first time was both the most irritating and the most hilarious. We have an old phone loaded with some educational videos and select songs for our 3.5 y.o., which we recently let her handle herself when she asks for it (and wasn't otherwise misbehaving for most of the day). So one time, we gave her the phone when she asked, and a minute later, we heard an increasingly agitated voice from the children's room, saying "I don't like you. I DON'T LIKE YOU. GO AWAY." - and we noticed we are not hearing the music. I went over to check, and sure enough, Google's assistant somehow triggered in the middle of the video, pausing it, refusing to turn itself off, and saying some nonsense. (The hilarious bit is that my daughter perfectly summed up what my wife and I learned to think about the voice assistants. We don't like you. GTFO.)
markstos 4y ago
Following the article, it would still work to send malicious media to targets to be played in the presence of their Echo devices. Presuming the media was played one at a time, it would not trigger as a " mass media" event would still work despite being pre-recorded and a "mass" distribution.
miles 4y ago
Trick question; she never sleeps. Amazon Echo Recorded And Sent Couple's Conversation — All Without Their Knowledge https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096/amazon-echo-recorded-and-sent-couples-conversation-all-without-their-knowledge https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096... Cary man says 'Alexa' disclosed private conversation https://www.wral.com/cary-man-says-alexa-disclosed-private-conversation/16745480/ https://www.wral.com/cary-man-says-alexa-disclosed-private-c...
- jrockway 4y ago
  Next week on Local News: "Man fined after his butt dials 911" and "Cat walking on keyboard sends unfinished draft of email" Basically, both of these articles are about a poorly-thought-out feature ("Alexa, send a message to $CONTACT") rather than some deep conspiracy to share your private thoughts with corporate America. I can see why the victims are annoyed, but it's kind of like "I turned my thermostat up to 80 and got a $700 gas bill". That can happen. It's not a conspiracy.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > Man fined after his butt dials 911" Tangent: I know the phenomenon can also happen with your thigh, but sticking to the name itself: I never got and still don't get why "butt dialing" is a thing - because I can't understand why on Earth would people carry a phone in their back pocket. Or a wallet, for that matter, which was a popular sight before smartphones. I regularly see people carrying either on their butt, often sticking half-way out of pocket. They're like walking billboards for pickpockets, with blinking LEDs forming a banner saying "easy target // steal from me!!". Hell, in some cases the phone is sticking out so much that I wonder how many times a day they lose it.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > I can't understand why on Earth would people carry a phone in their back pocket. My guess is the biggest single reason is women. Have you seen what passes for pockets in womens' pants? Especially front pockets. My wife will put her phone in her back pocket sometimes because the front pocket is maybe two inches deep.
mabbo 4y ago
But who is paying for all this R&D? I love my echo. Sits in my livingroom and mostly answers my questions about the weather and converting units from oz to ml when I'm cooking. But since I purchased it I have never once paid a penny for the use of it's service. One could argue that Amazon can advertise better because it knows I ask all these questions, but Amazon 'advertising' is mostly just forcing sellers to pay for the top spot on Amazon search. Is that really going to make more money by knowing that I don't know the weather today? I get the impression that Amazon has finally clued into the fact that paying thousands of developers and research scientists to build a voice assistant that makes no money is not a great business model. The coming layoffs have left a lot of my friends in the Alexa organization rightfully worried.
- kulahan 4y ago
  Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal. It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that resume just in case.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You sort of wonder what happened. I assume the thinking was along the lines of: If you had a personal human assistant at home you'd probably delegate a lot of things to them. (Not sure how true this is in general, but let's go with that.) But Alexa would have to be a lot more intelligent and plugged into a lot more systems before it could do tasks of any complexity--especially tasks with financial consequences. There's maybe half a dozen things I use Alexa for and none of them involve giving Amazon a nickel.
  - mabbo 4y ago
    > Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. I think the deeper issue is that when Amazon started the product (I heard rumours of it circa 2014 or so?) Amazon was a trusted retailed. Stuff was cheap and generally good. Now it's a scummy marketplace filled with fakes and frauds. I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about to buy.
nimbius 4y ago
why not just embed an ultrasonic tone sequence that invalidates the Alexa invocation?
- freedomben 4y ago
  That would work for their own commercial, but it wouldn't address any of the other scenarios like the pranks.
- akira2501 4y ago
  You're presuming it won't be filtered out or that the device has speakers capable of reproducing that tone reliably. You might consider some kind of embedded psychoacoustically masked signal that could be detected.
incanus77 4y ago
Constrast this with Apple's machine learning write-up from 2017, where the audio never leaves the device instead of being streamed to the cloud continuously. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri > This process not only reduces the probability that "Hey Siri" spoken by another person will trigger the iPhone, but also reduces the rate at which other, similar-sounding phrases trigger Siri.
- btgeekboy 4y ago
  The article mentions that the Echo does something similar locally, so the cloud-side part is an additional layer.
  - incanus77 4y ago
    No, it's different in a major way. Apple: - Only ever uploads anything to the cloud after a *successful* wake word is detected on-device (and, critically, lets you know with a voice confirmation). Amazon: - "On most Echo devices" checks on-device against known commercials (the point of this article). Then: - "In the cloud: Every audio request to Alexa that starts with a wake word is checked..." — successful or not. Meaning, all audio requests are streamed, then problematic wake words are filtered, then the phrase is acted on. From the article: > Ideally, a device will identify media audio using locally stored fingerprints, so it does not wake up at all. If it does wake up, and we match the media event in the cloud, the device will quickly and quietly turn back off. i.e. if a media match is not detected locally, the audio (all audio) is next sent to the cloud for screening & possible action. Everything here on the Amazon side is about detected false-positives, on-device or not, and nothing is about protecting the user's privacy.
    - ars 4y ago
      How is that different? Alexa also only uploads after a successful wake word. > is very possible that anything could be matched (i.e. sent) in the cloud. You misread it. Only after a wakeword (Alexa) is anything sent, and then it gets double checked. Apple doesn't see to have any double check at all - that doesn't make it better.
Kwpolska 4y ago
So they’re training Alexa not to recognize the specific recording. I’m wondering if this has any side effects for the actors from those ads: if they have an Alexa at home, does it (sometimes) fail to recognize them? (And wouldn’t it be cool, if somewhat dystopian, if Alexas all over the US quipped “hey, that’s my big sister on the TV!”?)
- paxys 4y ago
  Possibly, but a system like this would also be time-boxed (turned on for the day of the super bowl or just a few hours).
- crote 4y ago
  Ads usually have music in the background, those get included in the fingerprinting too. Besides that, the fingerprint consists of a number of time slices. The actors personal Alexa will probably only fail if they try to use it with exactly the same millisecond-scale timing, exactly the same intonation, and with exactly the same background noise.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    If it was like that then a home with some other source of noise (other music stream, someone speaking loudly etc) during the commercial would trigger the hotword. I guess that fingerprinting has to have some sort of tolerance anyway
- bcrl 4y ago
  I wonder what sort of technical debt the Alexa team is racking up by putting in hacks like this.
itqwertz 4y ago
The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding custom Skills is fairly arbitrary and broken. You’ll be lucky to make $20/month from ISPs (in-skill purchases) and the other dead-end up sells your customers/users will ignore.
- paxys 4y ago
  This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.
    - fortyseven 4y ago
      I read this in Dale Gribble's voice.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
    - 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
I wonder when we’ll have on-device AI smart enough to recognize when they’re not being meant, like humans are capable off. It still seems a long way off.
polski-g 4y ago
In the movie Moonfall, there was a Google Home product placement. The actor said "We have to go guys. Hey google, turn off the TV" My Google Home activated and then turned off my TV. I'm not sure it was a good sales pitch for the product.
zahma 4y ago
Acoustic fingerprinting sounds like an excellent method to begin identifying anyone and everyone who utters a sentence around one of Amazon’s spy toys.
ksaj 4y ago
They could have done it easier with a simple notch filter. Basically completely remove a frequency that doesn't affect intelligibility for ad purposes, and Alexa ignores anything with that frequency notched out.
root5 4y ago
If you like to learn more about the fingerprint internals on an Echo smart speaker, checkout Section II -> Alexa Internals -> Acoustic Fingerprints in the paper at https://unacceptable-privacy.github.io https://unacceptable-privacy.github.io
hn92726819 4y ago
> the audio is checked against a fraction of other Alexa requests arriving at around the same time. If the audio of a request matches that of requests from at least two other customers, we identify it as a media event I wonder what that fraction is. If you put 10 Alexas in a room I wonder if it's possible that none of them wake up.

100 points by xuaihua 4y ago

This makes me wonder, has anyone found a buffer overflow in the Alexa cue? Meaning that by activating Alexa with the right audio you make the audio processor crash?

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Wow. That's a thought. And if you can make it crash, then you can maybe make it run shellcode instead...
- dylan604 4y ago
  do you then have to tell it elle ess space slash var slash log?

xuaihua 4y ago

An older article, and specifically about their Super Bowl ads, but a fascinating answer to a question I had directly from the source at Amazon.

CharlesW 4y ago
For anyone who's curious, it's typical for Alexa to respond to pre-recorded mentions of her name. Last night, ours woke to "Alex" while watching The Traitors. (Speaking of being intrusive, lately Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities to the point that my kids asked me to fire her. It's looking like Siri + Homebridge will allow me to do that.)
- chasd00 4y ago
  > Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities I was wondering it that was just me, it seems a lot of responses are now ending with "...by the way, did you know i can...". I sometimes listen to NPR ( please don't judge ) and i get the "...we still don't have your zip code..." a lot but i think that is an NPR thing and not an Alexa thing.
  - delecti 4y ago
    It's definitely not just you. I use the "Good Morning" skill nearly daily (which responds with a joke or a little fact about the date), and about 1/3 of the time, before the actual response, she'll interrupt to ask that I setup voice recognition so she knows my name.
- scubbo 4y ago
  While I heartily recommend you to explore other options, there's a solution to that infuriating behaviour: https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895 https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Thanks! I found it a few messages down: "Alexa, stop 'By The Way'" Alexa will then reply, "I will snooze my suggestions…for now." (The foreboding pause was implied.)
    - minutillo 4y ago
      And the suggestions will restart in a few days. What we did is add "stop by the way" as a custom command to our "goodnight" routine, so the thing is reminded every single night that these suggestions are unwelcome. The annoyance maximization team at amazon hasn't deployed countermeasures to this yet.
    - scubbo 4y ago
      Haha, yeah, not a fan of that :( anecdotally, they haven't restarted for me yet (activated it ~6 months ago), but I really wish there was a permanent option.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danpalmer 4y ago

I wonder if there's a way to identify audio from speakers. IT might not work for higher end speakers or lower end microphones, but I'm sure the limited frequency range from speakers, and perhaps artifacts of audio compression that might not be noticeable to humans, would identify non-human audio. I've seen a similar approach used for visuals, separating an image at the point of recording based on the type of light source – artificial light having different properties to natural light.

jmole 4y ago
Not for consumer level devices. There’s an inherent tradeoff between false positives and true recognition rate. If you make the wrong choice, it means the device doesn’t respond when you say the wake word. There’s nothing that infuriates users more than having to say it again and again to get a response: “Alexa. Alexa! ALEXA!!”
- muted_sorts 4y ago
  [dead]
remram 4y ago
It always seems like my cat can tell what's from a speaker and what's real. My wife calling to the cat over the phone never triggers any reaction, and the cat will often jump out because of a little noise in the kitchen or outside even though a movie is playing. I don't know how much of that is directionality and how much is the sound itself. Cats probably hear different frequencies than humans, but as you point out it wouldn't be too hard to make smart devices' microphones sensitive to those frequencies that our devices' speakers don't emit correctly (because humans don't hear them).
- buildbot 4y ago
  Interestingly, this was true for my cat until we tried with a device with beamforming - a homepod. It will convince her there is a bird/cat/thing in the room.
- 4y ago

bitwize 4y ago

This reminds me of a PSA about texting and driving that aired on the radio in some parts of the USA (or maybe Canada?) a few years back. At the end, the announcer says: "Hey Siri, go into airplane mode."

RHSeeger 4y ago
That sounds like a recipe for causing _more_ accidents as a lot of people are forced to take their eyes off the road to fix their phone; all at the same time.
- philwelch 4y ago
  And losing their GPS to boot
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Airplane mode AFAIK (and seems to be confirmed online and in my own experience) does not disable GPS.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Acquiring location via GPS does not require transmitting over the radio, so that alone may well not be affected by airplane mode. However, most map apps download street map info through the network and cache it for unspecified amounts of time, so unless you use OsmAnd or something, you may lose map data and turn-by-turn navigation.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      GPS itself, no, but phones will pick up geolocation data through cell towers and most turn-by-turn directions use data connections. Though I've never driven in airplane mode so I don't know how well it actually works.

tyoma 4y ago

My echo dot repeatedly self-commands during Amazon Story Time, which was hilarious at first but is now kind of frustrating.

atkailash 4y ago

Ok but why she respond still responds to Michael from the TV but not echo when I’m yelling at it the third time trying to set a timer. There’s a reason I’ve switched almost exclusively to Siri.

_ea1k 4y ago
I've been amazed at how rough the flows are around timers. Its a pretty basic piece of functionality, but even something as simple as cancelling them does not work reliably.
- atkailash 4y ago
  [dead]
jcutrell 4y ago
Today I asked Siri what the temperature was this morning. It told me it doesn’t have access to past weather information. Siri has been available for 12 years… I cannot understand why it hasn’t leaped forward more than it has. Embarrassingly low level of progress IMO, though for some things it still remains best in class.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  I know it's probably not fair, yet, but tools like ChatGPT show where Siri et al could end up with the right engineering and product design. It's almost spooky how well ChatGPT understands my queries. (Granted, I don't think the understanding is necessarily related to GPT itself.)
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  Has anyone seen a change log for Siri or a roadmap for future features? I feel as if the functionality is almost the same as it was on release with a nicer sounding voice today.
- atkailash 4y ago
  [dead]

blowski 4y ago

My friend has an Alexa. It's not an unusual for it to suddenly respond to something happening elsewhere in the kitchen, like a YouTube video on a laptop.

yftsui 4y ago

Isn’t this just a fix after Jimmy Kimmel’s prank ordered $500 worth of swimming noodles for most Alexa users back in 2017? https://youtu.be/hdDBKxJSAHQ https://youtu.be/hdDBKxJSAHQ (Starting around 6:40 mark is the 10 unit order)

jjtheblunt 4y ago

Our Alexa responds to more than just her name including on TV which is amusing and kinda annoying at once.

EGreg 4y ago

I thought that these voice assistants were keyed to people’s individual voices, and their characteristics. Like what VALL-E clones

vidarh 4y ago
Alexa/Echo devices at least can recognise voice. If you ask "Alexa, who am I?" it will try to tell you who it heard. To learn a new person you can go "Alexa, learn my voice" (I have no idea to what extent it uses this - e.g. I'd love for it to know that when it recognises my girlfriend, it should apply her music preferences from her profile on my account, but if it does it's by no means obvious). It specifically seems to recognise the voice based on the wake word - my son an I tested this by having one of us say "Alexa" and then the other saying "who am I?", and it'd consistently give the name of the person who said "Alexa".
- jsmith45 4y ago
  One use I've seen of it knowing who is talking is that it can attribute items added to a shopping or todo (or other) list with the name of the person who added it. Beyond that, I'm not at all sure what scenarios it uses that data for.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Can we find an open source package that can analyze audio from a podcast with multiple people and determine who is speaking in a given second?

EGreg 4y ago

Is there an open source software that can identify who is speaking, not just what is being said, based on some small training based on voice?

jorvi 4y ago

Meanwhile, I’ve had to disable ‘Hey, Siri’ on my iPhone because it’ll trigger at least 4-5 times a day during normal conversations. No my name is not anything close to Siri. No, I didn’t train ‘Hey, Siri’ in a noisy environment. All I could possibly give for a reason is that I have a deep sonorous voice.

dangrie158 4y ago
Well my dog is called Lizzy. That’s apparently close enough. The first times I freaked out a bit when a voice answered to something I said to my dog when I was alone at home
leokennis 4y ago
Siri is triggered by so many words and phrases. Serious. Basically. Make sure it. Series. The worst part is that when it’s triggered, it refuses to shut up and be canceled. Siri is the laughing stock of the “AI assistants” space.
- geenew 4y ago
  To be fair, you have to say 'hey' before any of those. There aren't many times in normal conversation when one would say 'Hey serious', or 'Hey series'.
  - leokennis 4y ago
    You’d think an explicit “hey” was needed, but my daily experience makes clear that any sequence of sound even vaguely approximating something remotely sounding like “hey siri” will trigger Siri.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Google's assistant ain't better. Every few days something random will make it trigger on my or my wife's phone. Every time my mom visits, something ends up triggering it on her phone. Google must have made an update or something, because all those false positives started suddenly a few months back. The first time was both the most irritating and the most hilarious. We have an old phone loaded with some educational videos and select songs for our 3.5 y.o., which we recently let her handle herself when she asks for it (and wasn't otherwise misbehaving for most of the day). So one time, we gave her the phone when she asked, and a minute later, we heard an increasingly agitated voice from the children's room, saying "I don't like you. I DON'T LIKE YOU. GO AWAY." - and we noticed we are not hearing the music. I went over to check, and sure enough, Google's assistant somehow triggered in the middle of the video, pausing it, refusing to turn itself off, and saying some nonsense. (The hilarious bit is that my daughter perfectly summed up what my wife and I learned to think about the voice assistants. We don't like you. GTFO.)

markstos 4y ago

Following the article, it would still work to send malicious media to targets to be played in the presence of their Echo devices. Presuming the media was played one at a time, it would not trigger as a " mass media" event would still work despite being pre-recorded and a "mass" distribution.

miles 4y ago

Trick question; she never sleeps. Amazon Echo Recorded And Sent Couple's Conversation — All Without Their Knowledge https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096/amazon-echo-recorded-and-sent-couples-conversation-all-without-their-knowledge https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096... Cary man says 'Alexa' disclosed private conversation https://www.wral.com/cary-man-says-alexa-disclosed-private-conversation/16745480/ https://www.wral.com/cary-man-says-alexa-disclosed-private-c...

jrockway 4y ago
Next week on Local News: "Man fined after his butt dials 911" and "Cat walking on keyboard sends unfinished draft of email" Basically, both of these articles are about a poorly-thought-out feature ("Alexa, send a message to $CONTACT") rather than some deep conspiracy to share your private thoughts with corporate America. I can see why the victims are annoyed, but it's kind of like "I turned my thermostat up to 80 and got a $700 gas bill". That can happen. It's not a conspiracy.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Man fined after his butt dials 911" Tangent: I know the phenomenon can also happen with your thigh, but sticking to the name itself: I never got and still don't get why "butt dialing" is a thing - because I can't understand why on Earth would people carry a phone in their back pocket. Or a wallet, for that matter, which was a popular sight before smartphones. I regularly see people carrying either on their butt, often sticking half-way out of pocket. They're like walking billboards for pickpockets, with blinking LEDs forming a banner saying "easy target // steal from me!!". Hell, in some cases the phone is sticking out so much that I wonder how many times a day they lose it.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > I can't understand why on Earth would people carry a phone in their back pocket. My guess is the biggest single reason is women. Have you seen what passes for pockets in womens' pants? Especially front pockets. My wife will put her phone in her back pocket sometimes because the front pocket is maybe two inches deep.

mabbo 4y ago

But who is paying for all this R&D? I love my echo. Sits in my livingroom and mostly answers my questions about the weather and converting units from oz to ml when I'm cooking. But since I purchased it I have never once paid a penny for the use of it's service. One could argue that Amazon can advertise better because it knows I ask all these questions, but Amazon 'advertising' is mostly just forcing sellers to pay for the top spot on Amazon search. Is that really going to make more money by knowing that I don't know the weather today? I get the impression that Amazon has finally clued into the fact that paying thousands of developers and research scientists to build a voice assistant that makes no money is not a great business model. The coming layoffs have left a lot of my friends in the Alexa organization rightfully worried.

kulahan 4y ago
Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal. It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that resume just in case.
- ghaff 4y ago
  You sort of wonder what happened. I assume the thinking was along the lines of: If you had a personal human assistant at home you'd probably delegate a lot of things to them. (Not sure how true this is in general, but let's go with that.) But Alexa would have to be a lot more intelligent and plugged into a lot more systems before it could do tasks of any complexity--especially tasks with financial consequences. There's maybe half a dozen things I use Alexa for and none of them involve giving Amazon a nickel.
- mabbo 4y ago
  > Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. I think the deeper issue is that when Amazon started the product (I heard rumours of it circa 2014 or so?) Amazon was a trusted retailed. Stuff was cheap and generally good. Now it's a scummy marketplace filled with fakes and frauds. I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about to buy.

nimbius 4y ago

why not just embed an ultrasonic tone sequence that invalidates the Alexa invocation?

freedomben 4y ago
That would work for their own commercial, but it wouldn't address any of the other scenarios like the pranks.
akira2501 4y ago
You're presuming it won't be filtered out or that the device has speakers capable of reproducing that tone reliably. You might consider some kind of embedded psychoacoustically masked signal that could be detected.

incanus77 4y ago

Constrast this with Apple's machine learning write-up from 2017, where the audio never leaves the device instead of being streamed to the cloud continuously. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri > This process not only reduces the probability that "Hey Siri" spoken by another person will trigger the iPhone, but also reduces the rate at which other, similar-sounding phrases trigger Siri.

btgeekboy 4y ago
The article mentions that the Echo does something similar locally, so the cloud-side part is an additional layer.
- incanus77 4y ago
  No, it's different in a major way. Apple: - Only ever uploads anything to the cloud after a *successful* wake word is detected on-device (and, critically, lets you know with a voice confirmation). Amazon: - "On most Echo devices" checks on-device against known commercials (the point of this article). Then: - "In the cloud: Every audio request to Alexa that starts with a wake word is checked..." — successful or not. Meaning, all audio requests are streamed, then problematic wake words are filtered, then the phrase is acted on. From the article: > Ideally, a device will identify media audio using locally stored fingerprints, so it does not wake up at all. If it does wake up, and we match the media event in the cloud, the device will quickly and quietly turn back off. i.e. if a media match is not detected locally, the audio (all audio) is next sent to the cloud for screening & possible action. Everything here on the Amazon side is about detected false-positives, on-device or not, and nothing is about protecting the user's privacy.
  - ars 4y ago
    How is that different? Alexa also only uploads after a successful wake word. > is very possible that anything could be matched (i.e. sent) in the cloud. You misread it. Only after a wakeword (Alexa) is anything sent, and then it gets double checked. Apple doesn't see to have any double check at all - that doesn't make it better.

Kwpolska 4y ago

So they’re training Alexa not to recognize the specific recording. I’m wondering if this has any side effects for the actors from those ads: if they have an Alexa at home, does it (sometimes) fail to recognize them? (And wouldn’t it be cool, if somewhat dystopian, if Alexas all over the US quipped “hey, that’s my big sister on the TV!”?)

paxys 4y ago
Possibly, but a system like this would also be time-boxed (turned on for the day of the super bowl or just a few hours).
crote 4y ago
Ads usually have music in the background, those get included in the fingerprinting too. Besides that, the fingerprint consists of a number of time slices. The actors personal Alexa will probably only fail if they try to use it with exactly the same millisecond-scale timing, exactly the same intonation, and with exactly the same background noise.
- darkwater 4y ago
  If it was like that then a home with some other source of noise (other music stream, someone speaking loudly etc) during the commercial would trigger the hotword. I guess that fingerprinting has to have some sort of tolerance anyway
bcrl 4y ago
I wonder what sort of technical debt the Alexa team is racking up by putting in hacks like this.

itqwertz 4y ago

The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding custom Skills is fairly arbitrary and broken. You’ll be lucky to make $20/month from ISPs (in-skill purchases) and the other dead-end up sells your customers/users will ignore.

paxys 4y ago
This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.
  - fortyseven 4y ago
    I read this in Dale Gribble's voice.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
  - 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

I wonder when we’ll have on-device AI smart enough to recognize when they’re not being meant, like humans are capable off. It still seems a long way off.

polski-g 4y ago

In the movie Moonfall, there was a Google Home product placement. The actor said "We have to go guys. Hey google, turn off the TV" My Google Home activated and then turned off my TV. I'm not sure it was a good sales pitch for the product.

zahma 4y ago

Acoustic fingerprinting sounds like an excellent method to begin identifying anyone and everyone who utters a sentence around one of Amazon’s spy toys.

ksaj 4y ago

They could have done it easier with a simple notch filter. Basically completely remove a frequency that doesn't affect intelligibility for ad purposes, and Alexa ignores anything with that frequency notched out.

root5 4y ago

If you like to learn more about the fingerprint internals on an Echo smart speaker, checkout Section II -> Alexa Internals -> Acoustic Fingerprints in the paper at https://unacceptable-privacy.github.io https://unacceptable-privacy.github.io

hn92726819 4y ago

> the audio is checked against a fraction of other Alexa requests arriving at around the same time. If the audio of a request matches that of requests from at least two other customers, we identify it as a media event I wonder what that fraction is. If you put 10 Alexas in a room I wonder if it's possible that none of them wake up.