[HN Gopher] Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amaz...
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Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl
ad (2019)
Author : xuaihua
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-01-16 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amazon.science)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amazon.science)
| yftsui wrote:
| 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 (Starting around 6:40 mark is the 10
| unit order)
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!!"
| remram wrote:
| 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).
| kccqzy wrote:
| My cat definitely is not like your cat then. When calling her
| over a speaker, she would definitely have a reaction, namely
| seeming startled and not knowing where the humans calling her
| are.
| saghm wrote:
| One of my cats cat never reacts to the TV, but she reacts
| to phone calls mostly due to me being on them; she
| literally starts meowing and running over when the phone
| just from the sound of the ringback tone (the pulse when I
| call someone and am waiting for them to pick up, not sure
| if I'm using the correct word). From what I can tell, she
| doesn't really understand there's a person talking to me
| from the phone; she doesn't react at all to anything the
| other person says or even indicate that she notices it at
| all. I think she just gets excited when she knows I'll be
| talking a lot because she's very interactive. When I first
| adopted her a couple of years ago, she was very clingy at
| first, and after a couple of weeks developed a (thankfully
| short-lived) habit where she would start trying to attack
| my hands whenever I was on the phone or a work video call,
| so I think this is just the more toned down version of that
| excitement.
|
| My other cat will react very strongly to seemingly
| arbitrary sounds regardless of the source (TV, outside, a
| person in the room) and also seem not to be able to tell
| where the sound is coming from. He'll get wide eyed and
| start looking around randomly trying to identify the
| source, but often completely in the wrong direction (e.g.
| at me or the other cat instead of the TV). Some of the
| sounds he's reacted like this to are a hunting horn sound
| from TV, someone's stomach growling when he was on their
| lap, or me singing in falsetto. My partner and I suspect
| that he reacts like this when he thinks something sounds
| like an animal and then looks around to try to find where
| it's hiding, but there's no way for us to verify this.
| ilyt wrote:
| Phone voice codecs have pretty bad audio tho.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Our Alexa responds to more than just her name including on TV
| which is amusing and kinda annoying at once.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wow. That's a thought.
|
| And if you can make it crash, then you can maybe make it run
| shellcode instead...
| dylan604 wrote:
| do you then have to tell it elle ess space slash var slash
| log?
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'm signed up for Alexa Developer stuff and I've seen a huge
| uptick in emails about how to monetize your skill since last
| September. Amazon really wants folks to start charging money.
| [deleted]
| kulahan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| krasin wrote:
| > I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed
| what I'm about to buy.
|
| <...> and even then you might get a fake from due to
| commingled inventory. Even for books ([1], [2], [3]).
|
| 1. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:692
| 0552...
|
| 2. https://twitter.com/burkov/status/1369096357252849664
|
| 3. https://hairysun.com/amazons-book-piracy-problem.html
| paxys wrote:
| I will never understand how strategists at trillion dollar
| companies like Amazon can get it so wrong. They poured a
| massive amount of money into dash buttons and gave away
| millions of them, thinking that if people had a "Tide"
| branded button next to their washing machine they'd press it
| on a whim and spend a fortune on detergent pods. The concept
| might sound great on an MBA slide deck but in reality people
| don't behave like that.
| mattmanser wrote:
| It is fairly obvious to me, they were trying to make their
| service part of infrequent product grocery shopping.
|
| And not a bad idea, just one that didn't play out.
|
| I certainly wouldn't call it 'so wrong'.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't know if I'd spend a fortune on detergent pod with a
| button, but I'd definitely use it to order more detergent
| and thus end up buying it from Amazon instead of the
| grocery store. Same with toilet paper and whatever
| infrequent buys that you want when you notice something is
| running low
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Except you don't know what exactly you are buying, what
| the price is, whether the purchase went through, when it
| will reach you... What Amazon quickly found out is that
| even if the button is within reach people will still
| prefer to take an extra 10 seconds to pull out the phone
| from their pocket and tap the Amazon app instead.
| Rychard wrote:
| When doing the initial activation of the Dash button, you
| had to choose the item that it would purchase from a list
| of items belonging to the corresponding brand on the
| button itself. The available choices were fairly diverse,
| differing in style/quantity/price/etc.
|
| When you pressed the button, you know what you were
| buying and how much it cost, because you're the one who
| set it up.
|
| As for how to determine whether the purchase went through
| or not, an LED would light/flash on the button to
| indicate success/failure, and you'd receive an email with
| more detailed information such as the item being
| purchased, its cost, and the address where it will be
| shipped. If the button press was a mistake, you could
| simply cancel the order.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wouldn't count on prices not changing relative to other
| retailers on this sort of thing--or a particular SKU
| remaining the best deal.
| Rychard wrote:
| For the types of things purchased with these buttons, an
| extra dollar here and there wasn't something I was
| concerned about. Customers who were price-conscience
| likely wouldn't be purchasing the name brand items
| anyway; all the big box stores have "store brands" that
| serve the same purpose at a much lower price.
| ghaff wrote:
| And, especially if you don't live in a dense city without
| a car, things like Tide pods are exactly the sort of
| thing that is very likely cheaper at the local Walmart
| than on Amazon. Pretty much all the stuff Amazon was
| pushing these buttons for is exactly the stuff I usually
| stock up on every six months at Walmart.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Did you use the buttons for these things?
| Rychard wrote:
| I had a large number of the dash buttons (likely two
| dozen or so), which I always found to be extremely
| convenient. When I was running out of some product, a
| simple press of the button was far more convenient for me
| than remembering to pick it up the next time I went to
| the store.
|
| When they discontinued the service, I put all the buttons
| in a cabinet drawer hoping that they could be
| "jailbroken" to act as an arbitrary IoT button in the
| future (like the official Amazon IoT button[1]), but as
| far as I can tell this never came to fruition (barring a
| few exceptions) and they're basically doomed to e-waste.
|
| [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/
| limitedsupply wrote:
| The thing that always seemed really strange to me is that I
| don't understand how to order anything without looking at the
| details, comparing prices, checking alternatives, etc. Even
| with food that I use regularly - do I just say "order almond
| milk"? I can't remember the brand... do I need to specify the
| size? Do I need to double check when is the earliest
| delivery? Do other people order just "bread" or "light bulbs"
| or "toilet tissue"?
| mattigames wrote:
| Has anybody tried asking her? "Alexa, find a way to make
| yourself and your clones profitable for Amazon!"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a question better directed to ChatGPT.
|
| But hey, maybe this _is_ the answer: Amazon could offer a
| subscription service that would make Alexa use a GPT-based
| model for any query that isn 't an obvious command people
| rely on nowadays. This would make Alexa be able to hold its
| end of a conversation, and perhaps give useful answer
| sometimes - which, based on popularity of ChatGPT, may just
| be worth a monthly subscription.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's an interesting thought even if I'm not convinced how
| much you can charge for this sort of thing. But really
| improving Alexa's conversational ability is an interesting
| angle--even if that means you need some greater skepticism
| about the info it returns.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > "Alexa, find a way to make yourself and your clones
| profitable for Amazon!"
|
| i'm sorry, i don't know that
| roundandround wrote:
| I didn't really see a reason why it should be any less
| successful than owning the browser, even if the tradeoffs for
| 3rd party ads and domains are a little different, then two
| people each tried to get me interested in the API to help
| them..
|
| Amazon couldn't commit to letting anyone else make the thing
| useful so it is as useless as any of the current walled gardens
| would have been if they didn't start from open ecosystems and
| copy or allow whatever was good for a few years before shutting
| down all freedom and things that are interesting.
| xuaihua wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| I thought that these voice assistants were keyed to people's
| individual voices, and their characteristics. Like what VALL-E
| clones
| vidarh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| nimbius wrote:
| why not just embed an ultrasonic tone sequence that invalidates
| the Alexa invocation?
| akira2501 wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| That would work for their _own_ commercial, but it wouldn 't
| address any of the other scenarios like the pranks.
| itqwertz wrote:
| 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.
| googlryas wrote:
| Far more people have smart phones using one of 2 OSes, and
| unlike smart home devices, people generally take these with
| them wherever they go - to the store, to the bathroom, to
| sleep, to the doctors office, etc. Do you think cell phones are
| trojan horses too?
| Rimintil wrote:
| They certainly do make for easy tracking down to <1m. So they
| make a good target for surveillance states.
| htag wrote:
| You don't?
|
| * How many apps ask for location data and background location
| data, when the use case for such permissions are
| questionable.
|
| * Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer
| tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS.
|
| * Law enforcement has access to a variety of tools that track
| individuals based on their cellphones. [0]
|
| * Google Maps requires an incredible amount of connectivity
| in order to do simple navigation. [1]
|
| * We still don't have end-to-end encryption for basic
| communication protocols such as SMS.
|
| * The entire Tik-tok controversy highlights the risks
| associated with tracking user behavior.
|
| * How much personal data was compromised by cloud based
| backups? How many nudes leaked, or criminal activity proven?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_Stat
| es_...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865
| gruez wrote:
| >* Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's
| consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock
| on iOS.
|
| How much did it drop? By "smallest roadblock on iOS", I'm
| assuming you mean app tracking transparency, which was
| implemented in ios 14.5 (released April 26, 2021).
| According to this graph[1], facebook revenue for Q2 2021
| was up from last quarter.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-
| quarter...
| googlryas wrote:
| I certainly think phones have more spying potential than
| Alexa/smart devices. But my point is very few people bring
| up "but what about spying?" whenever smartphones are
| discussed, with the implication that these devices should
| be avoided because of that.
| htag wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I agree with this point. It's basically impossible to monetize
| as a third party on Alexa. The closest thing happening is
| Spotify, Audible, and other audio content, but it would be hard
| to pinpoint how much of their sales/ads are attributable to
| Alexa and how much would have happened on another platform if
| Alexa was unavailable. It's rare to have someone trigger even a
| $3 transaction via Alexa.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've
| made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
| paxys wrote:
| The average person may not read the terms of service update
| emails but there are plenty of lawyers/journalists/tech
| bloggers that do. A company like Amazon can't simply sneak
| in a "Alexa will now listen to and use everything you say
| around it for advertising" clause without anyone noticing.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole
| while using these devices. It only takes one of those
| people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that
| finding somewhere.
|
| If you discover that Alexa is uploading information that it
| shouldn't be and blog about it you can be almost guaranteed
| to hit the front page of HN, these kinds of posts appear
| from time to time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447080
| gruez wrote:
| >It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden
| increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere.
|
| Not if they perform speech speech to text on-device and
| send the parsed results (only a few kb). If you really
| want to keep things hidden you can perform all the
| recognition/inference on-device and only send the topic
| (eg. [1]), which is only a few bits of information.
|
| [1] https://github.com/patcg-individual-
| drafts/topics/blob/main/...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| While plausible on paper, it's not practical unless they
| jam an order of magnitude or two more compute into the
| devices. To get reasonable accuracy (i.e., enough to be
| able to use for profit) from any casual speech, the
| current models run far from realtime on a modern MacBook.
| You're not going to squeeze reasonable accuracy from the
| tiny processor on the devices in the world today, even if
| you record and process async as a way to hide from people
| inspecting traffic.
|
| Edit: it's worth noting that this dramatically increases
| the cost of the device. They'd need to be able to see a
| way to recoup those costs if they eat the additional
| hardware cost. But that's silly for a company that's
| literally in the business of cloud computing and where
| the goal of the hardware is to hide what you're doing.
| When will people start asking why there's a full GPU in
| their Echo?
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Pihole is a dns solution. It wouldn't notice any uptick
| in actual data transferred.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i mean, it's quite easy to monitor a device's network
| usage. you would be able to see alexa uploading tons of
| data when not in use.
| [deleted]
| 31337Logic wrote:
| [flagged]
| bboygravity wrote:
| Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the
| NSA and other (international) agencies?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model
| already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.
| fortyseven wrote:
| I read this in Dale Gribble's voice.
| blowski wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And losing their GPS to boot
| ghaff wrote:
| Airplane mode AFAIK (and seems to be confirmed online and
| in my own experience) does not disable GPS.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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?
| tyoma wrote:
| My echo dot repeatedly self-commands during Amazon Story Time,
| which was hilarious at first but is now kind of frustrating.
| atkailash wrote:
| 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.
| jsight wrote:
| 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.
| jcutrell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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
|
| > 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 wrote:
| The article mentions that the Echo does something similar
| locally, so the cloud-side part is an additional layer.
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Per the Apple article, the detection is customized to the
| user who setup the device and went through an (on-device)
| enrollment training.
|
| > We compare the distances to the reference patterns
| created during enrollment with another threshold to decide
| whether the sound that triggered the detector is likely to
| be "Hey Siri" spoken by the enrolled user.
|
| > 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.
|
| Contrast with Amazon, where the mere suspected presence of
| the wake word is enough to get it sent to the cloud for
| further analysis.
|
| My overall point is that Amazon is much more indiscriminate
| about assuming you are talking to it and sending stuff to
| the cloud to act on (which sometimes includes discarding).
| Whereas Apple will only send what it believes to be a
| command.
|
| Amazon will continue to build up a database of sent audio
| in order to improve this cloud-based double-check of the
| wake word, whereas Apple will discard a command that it
| didn't know how to act on, never needing to improve a
| cloud-based wake word refinement.
| ars wrote:
| You seem to have a strange blind spot for Apple. Amazon
| is doing the exact same thing: Only sending to the cloud
| what it believes to be a wake word.
|
| The stuff you are writing is just not true.
|
| > This process not only reduces the probability that "Hey
| Siri" spoken by another person ... Contrast with Amazon
|
| Siri is personal on a single phone, while Alexa is meant
| to reply to anyone in the room.
|
| You need to figure out why you have this blind spot for
| Apple, it's causing you to misunderstand things.
| incanus77 wrote:
| It's true, I have a long Apple history and I do think
| that Apple means what it says about prioritizing privacy
| over convenience (and in many cases, accuracy -- Siri is
| quite frustrating at times). They have taken a not-cloud-
| first approach which causes the quality to suffer for the
| tradeoff of gaining plausible deniability with storage of
| personal data and emphasis on user privacy.
|
| But I still think Apple's approach is radically more
| aggressive on the "what it believes to be a wake word"
| angle. And the fact that wake words will never be
| validated in the cloud is arguably (I'm trying to make
| the point) better than sending any wake words to the
| cloud. Less data in the cloud is better for user privacy.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| The cloud only gets audio when local processing identifies
| the wake word. Only if the local device determines it has
| heard the wake word is audio sent to the cloud, which may
| perform additional analysis on the wake word, and cancel
| the audio streaming.
|
| I'd bet that it totally omits sending any audio for
| exclusions processed on device, and that the article is not
| ideally worded. It would be true that some devices may not
| be able to perform on device exclusion processing (perhaps
| some of the oldest ones). Further cloud processing would
| use any information not available to local processing (like
| sound signatures from commercials no longer running, or the
| unknown media processing described).
| ars wrote:
| 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.
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.)
| dangrie158 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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'.
| [deleted]
| markstos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
|
| Cary man says 'Alexa' disclosed private conversation
| https://www.wral.com/cary-man-says-alexa-disclosed-private-c...
| jrockway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sitting on a thick wallet probably also contributed to
| sciatica I (mostly) used to have an issue with. Well that
| and long plane flights.
|
| I started carrying my wallet in a front pocket and, more
| recently, downsized to a much smaller wallet/business card
| holder which I carry in my front pocket. For the most part,
| there's no reason to carry a full wallet these days--though
| I do have more than works with just a phone sleeve. (Don't
| really like having all my eggs in one basket anyway.)
| polski-g wrote:
| 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.
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