Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands • Hacker News Board

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#31

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, May 10, 2018, 3:59 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #24

hunter2_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.

So a simple media command fails 1 in 5 times? This is the best SV can do with a incredibly well-studied technology (voice recognition)?

Well, I try new things all the time. For example, sometimes it finds an artist or song whose name contains the genre I was trying to play. I could approach 100% with "hey google, play" when something is paused (but not "hey google, stop" when it's playing, because of the ambient noise of whatever is playing making the wake word fail).

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#32

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:00 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #27

mikeash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask it “What can I ask you?” and it will show a big list of capabilities and phrases to trigger them.

It is really weird to refer to a device in the second person. Why isn't there some other way to get that info?

"What can I ask Google Assistant" also works. But I assume what you really mean is something out of band. Google Assistant actually does finish with a recommendation to see more in the app.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#33

Post by wlesieutre » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #19

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.

A recent survey of iPhone X users backs up the notion that people aren't happy with it

https://techpinions.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Screen-Sh...

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#34

Post by djsumdog » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #25

bsenftner wrote: post #11

Hidden audio is simply too easy. Hidden audio is the knife that kills desire for any financial services access through a voice assistant - for those smart enough to not follow the horde.

for me it kills all desire to have a voice assistant. I am already in the camp of taping over the camera's in my computers now will I need to worry about the microphone or what comes from the speakers? so the question is, shouldn't they be able to detect the wavelength of what they are processing to weed out some of the more obvious tricks? with voice recognition could it also not be limited to a voice it is trained…

I don't bother taping over stuff. If you think about it, there are probably 10+ microphones in your room (Samsung TVs, phones, laptops, tablets, etc.)

I run 3rd party roms, Linux on all my dev/tv machines, disable Cortana on my gaming laptop, and hope there isn't something listening in all that trusted, untrusted and oss code I'm running.

I told my roommate I'd move out if he ever got an Alexa or Google home device. I do want to run Jarvis, or one of the OSS alternatives. Many of them send your data to Google/Amazon as well if you enable using their Speech-to-Text services, but they also have options for using local OSS decoders as well (and typically enable those by default).

Our phones are so powerful today there is no reason to send your speech to the cloud (someone else's computer). It should just be done locally; and tech should be improved so accuracy is improved locally without needing the larger datasets that Google/Amazon/Apple use.

More devs need to use the OSS assistance instead, and maybe that will push other engineers to no go the easy route and opt to protect their privacy instead.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#35

Post by teachrdan » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

The real problem is that Alexa and Siri increase your attack surface area to include every speaker in your home--including any cheapo Bluetooth or internet-connected speakers that could get hacked to produce these human-inaudible sounds.

(To be fair, I recall this specific point coming up in an HR thread about Alexa being able to open your door for Amazon deliveries, but I thought it was worth reiterating here.)

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#36

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #30

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

It makes me think of old text based adventure games where you type in "open door" or "draw gun". All these complex "A.I." based voice assistants still break down to the vocabulary problem. They try to solve the general case by not giving humans/customers the language spec. There is probably more than just an AI that does speech to text and then a second phase interpreter. I suspect there is some AI in the first layer…

But you wouldn't know to type xyzzy.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#37

Post by rootusrootus » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #19

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.

Sometimes it works great. Sometimes I can't get Siri to do anything right. Anecdotally I've found that Google's voice assistant is quite a lot better. Unfortunately I am unwilling to accept the rest of Google's terms and conditions so I am stuck with Siri for the foreseeable future.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#38

Post by hedora » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

Am I the only one that wants a nice cherry mechanical keyboard that transcribes typed commands to inaudible voice commands?

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#39

Post by _dan » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

I have a Sonos setup in my house, it's connected to Spotify Premium (as I suspect most Sonos systems are). I recently added a Sonos/Alexa hybrid thing because I liked the idea of being able to play whatever I fancied while cooking.

"Alexa play in the kitchen from spotify"

No other combination of words works. I'm not sure why it needs me to say "kitchen", all my Sonos systems are connected together, but if I say anything else it'll either play on just the one speaker or not work at all. I'm not sure why I must say "from spotify", but apparently I do or it ends up playing some random radio station from some other service.

I find things like this quite the mouthful:

"Alexa play Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath in the kitchen from spotify"

..and with a statement so complicated it often misunderstands and starts doing something random.

I would MUCH prefer a simple voice based API. Attempting to understand conversational speech properly rarely seems to work effectively and often just ends up with users memorising a command just to get it to understand.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#40

Post by mistermann » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #23

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

Serious off-topic question: Are there docs for Siri so that i can learn what it can/can’t do? I have tried skipping songs, playing a genre, set random play, and similar in iTunes — generally a failure, often initiates an unwanted phone call. On the phone I can successfully call the intended contact about 50% of the time, possibly because I have ~250 contacts. I suspect that if i knew the right words to interact with…

Ask it “What can I ask you?” and it will show a big list of capabilities and phrases to trigger them.

Is there a web page one can refer to instead? Seems like it could be far more efficient way to learn, and would also be able to easily highlight newly released features.