9 ms·

Toyota ad hijacks Siri to switch off iPhones while driving

125 points by johansch 11y ago

vbezhenar 11y ago
Hey, Windows! Format C colon slash y enter That was a joke many years ago. Not so joke today?
- DanBC 11y ago
  Funnier was to label a disc with ANSI commands. Anyone doing a directory listing would end up with blinking text or garish colours.
brobinson 11y ago
I used my iPhone for turn-by-turn directions because it was far superior to the navigation functionality built into my car. This ad could potentially have caused me to have to interact with my phone while driving to disable airplane mode and allow me to resume navigation.
- sneak 11y ago
  No, it cannot cause that. You may illegally choose to then grab your phone while driving to fiddle with the settings, but that is your own reckless and negligent choice.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    It may definitely cause you to drive around in unknown area while trying to figure out where you can stop to turn the navigation back on. If you're on a motorway, that may be an additional 20+ miles until you can stop safely. If it happens to kill your navigation, it's going to cause a lot of unnecessary distraction. Whether you decide to turn it on again while driving or wait until you can stop.
  - brobinson 11y ago
    I don't think it's illegal to manipulate your phone while driving anywhere I've lived, though it was illegal to text or talk without using a hands-free device.
coldjavahole 11y ago
Could be worse - it could ask siri for advice on how to write firmware... or maybe asking siri for advice on what do in a crash situation as the onboard firmware will now dangerously accelerate the car into a nearby stationary object!
kaolinite 11y ago
Clever? There are plenty of completely valid uses for having a phone on whilst driving - such as navigation, streaming music or using CarPlay. As an iPhone needs to be plugged in to use "Hey Siri", this will pretty much entirely affect people using their devices legitimately - whereas people driving with one hand whilst they make a phone call with the other will be unaffected. This seems like it would be more likely to cause an accident as people have to divert attention from driving to mess with their phone so they can get navigation back (and having listened to the advert, I know I would be very distracted by it). Finally, is this even legal? I have no idea of the law in Sweden (and IANAL) but I feel like you could make the point that this advert is interfering with your device without authorisation.
- SloopJon 11y ago
  Sounds to me like Toyota accessed thousands of computers without authorization.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    They're a corporation. Little people laws don't apply to them. (Oh, how I long to be wrong on this, but I strongly suspect that nothing, or at least nothing that will make the campaign a net negative, will come of the fact that they violated the hell out of the CFAA.)
    - dangrossman 11y ago
      The ad ran in Sweden. CFAA is an American law.
      - geon 11y ago
        We have the equivalent law against "dataintrång", lit. computerized trespass/intrusion. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataintr%C3%A5ng https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataintr%C3%A5ng https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K4P9c https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K4P9c
Matt3o12_ 11y ago
I don't think this is a particularly good idea because the first thing I'd do is switching it back one. I might miss an important call. And we have Siri and headsets to make calling while driving as secure as talking to a child while driving. So why would anyone turn the hands free functionality off and require the driver to pick up the phone and turn it on. This endangers driving, not using siri/Google voice whole driving.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Actually couldn't you just tell siri to turn airplane mode off? Also a good argument for not using a radio in a car, but that is mostly my own personal bias.
  - vbezhenar 11y ago
    > Actually couldn't you just tell siri to turn airplane mode off? Siri is a network service, it can't work locally.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      For such simple commands, it could very well be made to. In fact, IIRC, it had an offline mode back in the day before Apple bought them.
      - StavrosK 11y ago
        It still has an offline mode that can only make calls.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I might miss an important call. OTOH, if you crash and die, you'll miss all calls. And the other passengers of the other car too.
  - Matt3o12_ 11y ago
    Sure, but the chances of crashing are rather low if you use hands-free soft- and hardware (such as siri to control the call and a headset). If you believe these things should not be allowed, either, because there are too distracting, you should not let children ride with you because they tend to ask way more distracting questions then you saying ("Hey Siri, call XXX").
MiguelHudnandez 11y ago
A clever idea with unintended consequences. Now my docked phone in navigation mode is disabled, and I have to fumble for the airplane mode switch to then it back on, distracting me. Or, my passenger, texting urgent details to someone else while plugged in to power, loses connection and doesn't realize. His message, "don't delete pied piper," never makes it to staff and a startup is ruined. Or, the cell phone hidden the in the car by a jealous husband gets switched off, convincing him that the jig is up and an unstable situation turns grim. Google and Apple should treat this as a security vulnerability. I think there were pranks related to Xbox voice control as well.
- toxican 11y ago
  I remember there was an xbox ad that had the unintended consequence of controller the viewer's xbox
- sneak 11y ago
  As a driver, the only thing you have to do is pay complete attention to the road and drive safely. It is not Toyota's fault if you stop doing that to fuck with your phone, even if they disabled your nav.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    "As a driver, the only thing you have to do is pay complete attention to the road and drive safely. It is not the company's fault if they played an ad that's just sirens and horns and people screaming, distracting you."
    - viraptor 11y ago
      If I could legally ban one thing in music, it would definitely be car horns and emergency vehicle sounds. There's nothing more annoying than hearing a horn and trying to decide if you need to emergency stop now, or if it was just some idiot deciding to put it in their music. Especially if you stream/shuffle and have no idea what song is coming up next.
tomjen3 11y ago
This should be considered hacking, not to mention interfering with driving, as you know some people would start fiddeling with their phones (without thinking).
just_had_coffee 11y ago
I am a cyclist. I am always incredibly wary when I see drivers using their phones. Yes, this happens a lot, and yes I am in the habit of looking very carefully if drivers have seen me or not. Usually they don't and drive as if I don't exist – it's so frequent that I am nearly driven over, that I have become a rather defensive cyclist. But indeed, apart from random aggressive people (e.g., just yesterday on my way home from work, a car shaved past me at rather high speed (about 50-60km/h at 10cm max) with youths shouting at me) on of my biggest gripes is people who text at the wheel. It's insane. (disclosure: I live in France, and as far as cycling culture/acceptance and infrastructure is concerned, this is a third-world country)
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I am a cyclist. I am always incredibly wary when I see drivers using their phones. OTOH, I'm always wary when I see cyclists on roads where heavy boxes run with 40-80 miles per hour...
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Where would you want cyclists to go exactly? Sidewalks filled with pedestrians? Not every road has a cycling path.
    - hellbanner 11y ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656153 "A bicycle superhighway was the future of transit"
    - bobbyi_settv 11y ago
      By foot? By car? By bus? "Cyclist" isn't a race or religion. He's not telling them "to go" anywhere. He's saying that if you choose to use a mode of transport that is a hazard and nuisance to others, you are in a glass house and shouldn't be throwing stones.
      - 11y ago
jamesbrownuhh 11y ago
'The ad relies on the fact that an iPhone, if plugged in and charging, will wake up on the voice command "Hey Siri"' -- actually, an iPhone will only respond to Hey Siri if you have _explicitly_ turned that feature on - it's not enabled by default and I would imagine that the vast majority of people wouldn't have bothered.
mukyu 11y ago
They think it is a world first, there there was an Xbox one ad[0] that was doing this over a year ago. They could have easily found it just googling "voice command ad" or similar. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/aaron-paul-xbox-one-voice-command_n_5500189.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/aaron-paul-xbox-one...
coldtea 11y ago
Let's be clear: this is more an ad to cause people to think of/buy Toyota than an actual thing that worked. What we saw in the ad is an ideal situation for the mechanism. Only a miniscule amount of iPhones will be affected by this. In real life, iPhones won't be plugged in, won't have Hello Siri enabled (an explicit thing to do), won't be turned to a station that plays the ad, and so on.
RRRA 11y ago
So what is the shortest wav that can disable both iOS and Android? ;)
- joshstrange 11y ago
  iOS: Settings -> General -> Siri -> Toggle "Allow 'Hey Siri'"
delish 11y ago
Many comments are saying, "This ad exposed people to danger." Zooming out, lots of ads expose people many kinds of danger. It's easier to criticize this ad because the danger-connection is obvious. It's harder to run robust thought-experiments about the effect of thousands of unhealthy food ads (or gambling ads, smoking ads, 411 scams, credit card offers). But the (speaking unscientifically) aggregate millions of extra calories consumed is a big deal. So saying, "Toyota shouldn't've done this" neglects wider contexts.
neotek 11y ago
This is the advertising equivalent of clickbait - make a video about an ad which maybe ran a handful of times, if it even aired at all, in the hopes of that video going viral and stimulating press coverage. Pizza Hut recently did something similar with their pizza box projector[1], a fun little idea which ultimately probably only directly reached a few hundred customers but which millions of people around the world read an article about. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pizza-hut-box-turns-into-movie-projector-for-your-smartphone-2015-6 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pizza-hut-box-turns-into-m...
imd23 11y ago
I ended up in a river because of switching a Spotify playlist. It was a miracle that saved my friends and me. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, PUT YOUR PHONE AWAY WHILE DRIVING. NOTHING, NOTHING CAN'T BE MORE IMPORTANT IN THOSE MINUTES YOU DRIVE THAT YOUR OR OTHER PEOPLES' LIFE. Want to check your phone? stop, check it and continue.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rsync 11y ago
  "I ended up in a river because of switching a Spotify playlist." That is a profound level of incompetence along a number of dimensions. Obligatory: ThisIsWhyWeCan'tHaveNiceThings.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    Tons of people have gotten in accidents doing things like adjusting the radio or air conditioning. Your car travels 88 feet blind every second you are distracted.
    - code_duck 11y ago
      Sometimes I drive at speeds other than 60 mph.
- tzakrajs 11y ago
  Highly suggest using Siri on a mounted device where you can say "Hey Siri" without taking your eyes from the road and speak your command. I am not sure if it is compatible with Spotify playlists but can give you a lot of power behind the wheel without compromising on safety.
eyeareque 11y ago
This makes me wonder, does the "hey Siri" recognition happen on the phone or on their servers? If it happens on the server does that mean that it's secretly uploading a recording of everything I say?
- kaolinite 11y ago
  No, it's 100% local. Even ignoring the privacy concerns of uploading everything you say, it would simply use too much data. You also need to opt-in: it's turned off by default and can be enabled by going to Settings > General > Siri > Allow "Hey Siri."
thisjepisje 11y ago
"Toyota makes front page of HN with silly gimmick"
wrs 11y ago
I can't find it now, but I'm certain I saw a story about a late-night television infomercial that used "OK Google" to dial a premium long distance number. As I recall, the show was pulled off the air in minutes.
nnutter 11y ago
My phone got part way through the process while watching the video. The lock screen prevented it from working.
vmarsy 11y ago
I have the same issue with my Xbox one: If a commercial on TV says :"now available on Xbox one", the Xbox interprets "Xbox one" as "Xbox ON" and turn on by itself. But here this is a malicious use of the feature. It doesn't even assume there might be other people in the car. I wouldn't be surprised if people start boycotting Toyotas if they get disturbed by this stupid ad. I noticed on windows 10 you can switch Cortana to "recognize my voice". This would fix the problem for anyone with a voice sufficiently different from the ad
gtirloni 11y ago
If a GPS system needs my 3G/4G connection to work, I'm not using it. Period. Clever ad, btw. It's not like they are running this every day to enforce some law. It might be a little distraction (on top of the other 200 distraction/minute you get while driving) but it's good press, and for a good reason.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rClJW9gnchc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rClJW9gnchc I wish there was something one could do every time we see someone staring at their phone while driving. I've seen it so many times. I wonder how many accidents those people have caused. Frankly, the problem does have a technological solution. Is there no interest on the part of companies like Apple to fix the problem? I wonder how many people have been killed by iPhones and other "smart" phones? One of the first things I noticed about smart phones was just how much more of your attention and focus they require for normal use. I've owned cellphones dating back to when they were the size of a shoe-box, including many Blackberry's. The last Blackberry I owned could be used with one hand. In fact, most everything I needed to do could be done with my thumb by using the rotary encoder on the side. The minute we went to touch screens things changed radically. Usability, from a certain perspective, suffered greatly. A touch interface is inherently fragile. With physical buttons you know what you are touching without looking. You can learn shape and location based cues that do not require looking at the phone. A touch interface cannot be explored. If you touch the screen a mm this way or that way you can make an absolute mess out of things. A touch interface requires that you look at he phone and focus on it intently enough that your brain task switches during that time. My own test is what I call the "Mom and Dad Test". I can deal with my kids in the back seat and retain far more attention on the road and my surroundings than when I have to look at and interact with a smart phone. The act of operating a smart phone, reading small type, locating buttons, menu's, understating state and then precisely touching small controls, seems to require far more CPU cycles than most other distractions. Of course, I haven't conducted any studies. This isn't my field. This is just conjecture and one data point. Having one teenage kid now driving we had to make sure we pounded the "don't use the phone while driving" message into his head. It's scary, actually. And, it is also scary to realize that you could be perfectly responsible while someone in another car might plow into you because they were focusing on a small little button on their iPhone to be able to click it. I hate government over-regulation and the insertion into our lives. However, this might just be a case where a law or mandate is required. It needs to be simple. We don't need a new government agency with 100,000 employees and 50,000 pages of rules. It can be stated very clearly: By the year 2020 car drivers should not be able to use their phones while the vehicle is in motion. Let car and phone manufacturers figure out how to accomplish this feat. If it means nobody in the car can use their phone. One of the arguments being made is that for navigation. Frankly, I hate using navigation on my iPhone. It goes back to the fragility of the interface. I have a dedicated GPS unit on the dashboard. It's pretty hard to screw up and it is pretty much immune to fumbling. The using Apple/Google for navigation on the iPhone can fall pray to the issues and fragility of a touch screen system with a pile of unrelated apps. How many of you are willing to lose your kids or your own life to the issues introduced by smart phones while driving? Right. Apple has enough money to figure out how to solve this problem. They need to solve this problem.

125 points by johansch 11y ago

vbezhenar 11y ago

Hey, Windows! Format C colon slash y enter That was a joke many years ago. Not so joke today?

DanBC 11y ago
Funnier was to label a disc with ANSI commands. Anyone doing a directory listing would end up with blinking text or garish colours.

brobinson 11y ago

I used my iPhone for turn-by-turn directions because it was far superior to the navigation functionality built into my car. This ad could potentially have caused me to have to interact with my phone while driving to disable airplane mode and allow me to resume navigation.

sneak 11y ago
No, it cannot cause that. You may illegally choose to then grab your phone while driving to fiddle with the settings, but that is your own reckless and negligent choice.
- viraptor 11y ago
  It may definitely cause you to drive around in unknown area while trying to figure out where you can stop to turn the navigation back on. If you're on a motorway, that may be an additional 20+ miles until you can stop safely. If it happens to kill your navigation, it's going to cause a lot of unnecessary distraction. Whether you decide to turn it on again while driving or wait until you can stop.
- brobinson 11y ago
  I don't think it's illegal to manipulate your phone while driving anywhere I've lived, though it was illegal to text or talk without using a hands-free device.

coldjavahole 11y ago

Could be worse - it could ask siri for advice on how to write firmware... or maybe asking siri for advice on what do in a crash situation as the onboard firmware will now dangerously accelerate the car into a nearby stationary object!

kaolinite 11y ago

Clever? There are plenty of completely valid uses for having a phone on whilst driving - such as navigation, streaming music or using CarPlay. As an iPhone needs to be plugged in to use "Hey Siri", this will pretty much entirely affect people using their devices legitimately - whereas people driving with one hand whilst they make a phone call with the other will be unaffected. This seems like it would be more likely to cause an accident as people have to divert attention from driving to mess with their phone so they can get navigation back (and having listened to the advert, I know I would be very distracted by it). Finally, is this even legal? I have no idea of the law in Sweden (and IANAL) but I feel like you could make the point that this advert is interfering with your device without authorisation.

SloopJon 11y ago
Sounds to me like Toyota accessed thousands of computers without authorization.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  They're a corporation. Little people laws don't apply to them. (Oh, how I long to be wrong on this, but I strongly suspect that nothing, or at least nothing that will make the campaign a net negative, will come of the fact that they violated the hell out of the CFAA.)
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    The ad ran in Sweden. CFAA is an American law.
    - geon 11y ago
      We have the equivalent law against "dataintrång", lit. computerized trespass/intrusion. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataintr%C3%A5ng https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataintr%C3%A5ng https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K4P9c https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K4P9c

Matt3o12_ 11y ago

I don't think this is a particularly good idea because the first thing I'd do is switching it back one. I might miss an important call. And we have Siri and headsets to make calling while driving as secure as talking to a child while driving. So why would anyone turn the hands free functionality off and require the driver to pick up the phone and turn it on. This endangers driving, not using siri/Google voice whole driving.

tomjen3 11y ago
Actually couldn't you just tell siri to turn airplane mode off? Also a good argument for not using a radio in a car, but that is mostly my own personal bias.
- vbezhenar 11y ago
  > Actually couldn't you just tell siri to turn airplane mode off? Siri is a network service, it can't work locally.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    For such simple commands, it could very well be made to. In fact, IIRC, it had an offline mode back in the day before Apple bought them.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      It still has an offline mode that can only make calls.
coldtea 11y ago
>I might miss an important call. OTOH, if you crash and die, you'll miss all calls. And the other passengers of the other car too.
- Matt3o12_ 11y ago
  Sure, but the chances of crashing are rather low if you use hands-free soft- and hardware (such as siri to control the call and a headset). If you believe these things should not be allowed, either, because there are too distracting, you should not let children ride with you because they tend to ask way more distracting questions then you saying ("Hey Siri, call XXX").

MiguelHudnandez 11y ago

A clever idea with unintended consequences. Now my docked phone in navigation mode is disabled, and I have to fumble for the airplane mode switch to then it back on, distracting me. Or, my passenger, texting urgent details to someone else while plugged in to power, loses connection and doesn't realize. His message, "don't delete pied piper," never makes it to staff and a startup is ruined. Or, the cell phone hidden the in the car by a jealous husband gets switched off, convincing him that the jig is up and an unstable situation turns grim. Google and Apple should treat this as a security vulnerability. I think there were pranks related to Xbox voice control as well.

toxican 11y ago
I remember there was an xbox ad that had the unintended consequence of controller the viewer's xbox
sneak 11y ago
As a driver, the only thing you have to do is pay complete attention to the road and drive safely. It is not Toyota's fault if you stop doing that to fuck with your phone, even if they disabled your nav.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  "As a driver, the only thing you have to do is pay complete attention to the road and drive safely. It is not the company's fault if they played an ad that's just sirens and horns and people screaming, distracting you."
  - viraptor 11y ago
    If I could legally ban one thing in music, it would definitely be car horns and emergency vehicle sounds. There's nothing more annoying than hearing a horn and trying to decide if you need to emergency stop now, or if it was just some idiot deciding to put it in their music. Especially if you stream/shuffle and have no idea what song is coming up next.

tomjen3 11y ago

This should be considered hacking, not to mention interfering with driving, as you know some people would start fiddeling with their phones (without thinking).

just_had_coffee 11y ago

I am a cyclist. I am always incredibly wary when I see drivers using their phones. Yes, this happens a lot, and yes I am in the habit of looking very carefully if drivers have seen me or not. Usually they don't and drive as if I don't exist – it's so frequent that I am nearly driven over, that I have become a rather defensive cyclist. But indeed, apart from random aggressive people (e.g., just yesterday on my way home from work, a car shaved past me at rather high speed (about 50-60km/h at 10cm max) with youths shouting at me) on of my biggest gripes is people who text at the wheel. It's insane. (disclosure: I live in France, and as far as cycling culture/acceptance and infrastructure is concerned, this is a third-world country)

coldtea 11y ago
>I am a cyclist. I am always incredibly wary when I see drivers using their phones. OTOH, I'm always wary when I see cyclists on roads where heavy boxes run with 40-80 miles per hour...
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Where would you want cyclists to go exactly? Sidewalks filled with pedestrians? Not every road has a cycling path.
  - hellbanner 11y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656153 "A bicycle superhighway was the future of transit"
  - bobbyi_settv 11y ago
    By foot? By car? By bus? "Cyclist" isn't a race or religion. He's not telling them "to go" anywhere. He's saying that if you choose to use a mode of transport that is a hazard and nuisance to others, you are in a glass house and shouldn't be throwing stones.
    - 11y ago

jamesbrownuhh 11y ago

'The ad relies on the fact that an iPhone, if plugged in and charging, will wake up on the voice command "Hey Siri"' -- actually, an iPhone will only respond to Hey Siri if you have _explicitly_ turned that feature on - it's not enabled by default and I would imagine that the vast majority of people wouldn't have bothered.

mukyu 11y ago

They think it is a world first, there there was an Xbox one ad[0] that was doing this over a year ago. They could have easily found it just googling "voice command ad" or similar. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/aaron-paul-xbox-one-voice-command_n_5500189.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/aaron-paul-xbox-one...

coldtea 11y ago

Let's be clear: this is more an ad to cause people to think of/buy Toyota than an actual thing that worked. What we saw in the ad is an ideal situation for the mechanism. Only a miniscule amount of iPhones will be affected by this. In real life, iPhones won't be plugged in, won't have Hello Siri enabled (an explicit thing to do), won't be turned to a station that plays the ad, and so on.

RRRA 11y ago

So what is the shortest wav that can disable both iOS and Android? ;)

joshstrange 11y ago
iOS: Settings -> General -> Siri -> Toggle "Allow 'Hey Siri'"

delish 11y ago

Many comments are saying, "This ad exposed people to danger." Zooming out, lots of ads expose people many kinds of danger. It's easier to criticize this ad because the danger-connection is obvious. It's harder to run robust thought-experiments about the effect of thousands of unhealthy food ads (or gambling ads, smoking ads, 411 scams, credit card offers). But the (speaking unscientifically) aggregate millions of extra calories consumed is a big deal. So saying, "Toyota shouldn't've done this" neglects wider contexts.

neotek 11y ago

This is the advertising equivalent of clickbait - make a video about an ad which maybe ran a handful of times, if it even aired at all, in the hopes of that video going viral and stimulating press coverage. Pizza Hut recently did something similar with their pizza box projector[1], a fun little idea which ultimately probably only directly reached a few hundred customers but which millions of people around the world read an article about. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pizza-hut-box-turns-into-movie-projector-for-your-smartphone-2015-6 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pizza-hut-box-turns-into-m...

imd23 11y ago

I ended up in a river because of switching a Spotify playlist. It was a miracle that saved my friends and me. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, PUT YOUR PHONE AWAY WHILE DRIVING. NOTHING, NOTHING CAN'T BE MORE IMPORTANT IN THOSE MINUTES YOU DRIVE THAT YOUR OR OTHER PEOPLES' LIFE. Want to check your phone? stop, check it and continue.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rsync 11y ago
"I ended up in a river because of switching a Spotify playlist." That is a profound level of incompetence along a number of dimensions. Obligatory: ThisIsWhyWeCan'tHaveNiceThings.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Tons of people have gotten in accidents doing things like adjusting the radio or air conditioning. Your car travels 88 feet blind every second you are distracted.
  - code_duck 11y ago
    Sometimes I drive at speeds other than 60 mph.
tzakrajs 11y ago
Highly suggest using Siri on a mounted device where you can say "Hey Siri" without taking your eyes from the road and speak your command. I am not sure if it is compatible with Spotify playlists but can give you a lot of power behind the wheel without compromising on safety.

eyeareque 11y ago

This makes me wonder, does the "hey Siri" recognition happen on the phone or on their servers? If it happens on the server does that mean that it's secretly uploading a recording of everything I say?

kaolinite 11y ago
No, it's 100% local. Even ignoring the privacy concerns of uploading everything you say, it would simply use too much data. You also need to opt-in: it's turned off by default and can be enabled by going to Settings > General > Siri > Allow "Hey Siri."

thisjepisje 11y ago

"Toyota makes front page of HN with silly gimmick"

wrs 11y ago

I can't find it now, but I'm certain I saw a story about a late-night television infomercial that used "OK Google" to dial a premium long distance number. As I recall, the show was pulled off the air in minutes.

nnutter 11y ago

My phone got part way through the process while watching the video. The lock screen prevented it from working.

vmarsy 11y ago

I have the same issue with my Xbox one: If a commercial on TV says :"now available on Xbox one", the Xbox interprets "Xbox one" as "Xbox ON" and turn on by itself. But here this is a malicious use of the feature. It doesn't even assume there might be other people in the car. I wouldn't be surprised if people start boycotting Toyotas if they get disturbed by this stupid ad. I noticed on windows 10 you can switch Cortana to "recognize my voice". This would fix the problem for anyone with a voice sufficiently different from the ad

gtirloni 11y ago

If a GPS system needs my 3G/4G connection to work, I'm not using it. Period. Clever ad, btw. It's not like they are running this every day to enforce some law. It might be a little distraction (on top of the other 200 distraction/minute you get while driving) but it's good press, and for a good reason.

rebootthesystem 11y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rClJW9gnchc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rClJW9gnchc I wish there was something one could do every time we see someone staring at their phone while driving. I've seen it so many times. I wonder how many accidents those people have caused. Frankly, the problem does have a technological solution. Is there no interest on the part of companies like Apple to fix the problem? I wonder how many people have been killed by iPhones and other "smart" phones? One of the first things I noticed about smart phones was just how much more of your attention and focus they require for normal use. I've owned cellphones dating back to when they were the size of a shoe-box, including many Blackberry's. The last Blackberry I owned could be used with one hand. In fact, most everything I needed to do could be done with my thumb by using the rotary encoder on the side. The minute we went to touch screens things changed radically. Usability, from a certain perspective, suffered greatly. A touch interface is inherently fragile. With physical buttons you know what you are touching without looking. You can learn shape and location based cues that do not require looking at the phone. A touch interface cannot be explored. If you touch the screen a mm this way or that way you can make an absolute mess out of things. A touch interface requires that you look at he phone and focus on it intently enough that your brain task switches during that time. My own test is what I call the "Mom and Dad Test". I can deal with my kids in the back seat and retain far more attention on the road and my surroundings than when I have to look at and interact with a smart phone. The act of operating a smart phone, reading small type, locating buttons, menu's, understating state and then precisely touching small controls, seems to require far more CPU cycles than most other distractions. Of course, I haven't conducted any studies. This isn't my field. This is just conjecture and one data point. Having one teenage kid now driving we had to make sure we pounded the "don't use the phone while driving" message into his head. It's scary, actually. And, it is also scary to realize that you could be perfectly responsible while someone in another car might plow into you because they were focusing on a small little button on their iPhone to be able to click it. I hate government over-regulation and the insertion into our lives. However, this might just be a case where a law or mandate is required. It needs to be simple. We don't need a new government agency with 100,000 employees and 50,000 pages of rules. It can be stated very clearly: By the year 2020 car drivers should not be able to use their phones while the vehicle is in motion. Let car and phone manufacturers figure out how to accomplish this feat. If it means nobody in the car can use their phone. One of the arguments being made is that for navigation. Frankly, I hate using navigation on my iPhone. It goes back to the fragility of the interface. I have a dedicated GPS unit on the dashboard. It's pretty hard to screw up and it is pretty much immune to fumbling. The using Apple/Google for navigation on the iPhone can fall pray to the issues and fragility of a touch screen system with a pile of unrelated apps. How many of you are willing to lose your kids or your own life to the issues introduced by smart phones while driving? Right. Apple has enough money to figure out how to solve this problem. They need to solve this problem.