Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 178 posts

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#91

Post by tomcam »

mkirklions wrote: post #69
sailfast wrote: post #44

I can't recommend highly enough that everyone at least turn on the audible sound when their assistants are listening. At a minimum you should know the kinds of things that end up triggering the device. There's a really wide area of detection and it's interesting to see where that is. I would also recommending changing your default word at a minimum. Then again, I might also recommend ditching the device entirely but…

I want to get rid of my alexa, but my wife uses it as a kitchen timer. We literally dont use it for anything else. Might get one of those philips light sets since our living room is weird... Tbh, id rather not use alexa..

I use my iPhone for that

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#92

Post by chatmasta »

toast0 wrote: post #88
mkirklions wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to get rid of my alexa, but my wife uses it as a kitchen timer. We literally dont use it for anything else. Might get one of those philips light sets since our living room is weird... Tbh, id rather not use alexa..

The clock / timer functions of Alexa/Google Home are super useful, but nothing else seems compelling to me. Someone could clearly make an offline device that did voice recognition clock and timer, but does anyone?

Or you could spend $3 and get a kitchen timer that you can slap to start, and beeps when it’s done!

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#93

Post by craftyguy »

sillyquiet wrote: post #73
kfrzcode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason people buy Coach bags etc... status and brand.

Why do people keep repeating this tired and offensive myth? I bought my iphone for the hardware and software capabilities that I judged to be the best for my use cases. And I am not the only one that actually had a non-trite reason, I am sure.

Sure, you did (there are always outliers in every group), but for every one of you there are dozens who are buying it as a status symbol.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#94

Post by jerf »

floatrock wrote: post #82
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, typical mics tend to pick up the typical human frequency range, though cheaper mics may have some really poor characteristics at the edges. Usually in the speech range they'll be pretty solid. However, there's a lot of play within the space. One difference is that microphones do a very direct recording of the sound waves, but what we hear is actually very distorted compared to the "real" sound by the nature of o…

hmm... the big idea that MP3 figured out was you can document all these "if there is a very loud 4000Hz sound, we can't hear a soft 4005Hz sound near it very well" psychoacoustic phenomena and just throw away all that extra "can't hear it very well" information, resulting in a vastly-smaller filesize that still sounds reasonable (yeah yeah it's not FLAC and the purist needs their gold-plated Monster cables, lets not…

I primarily brought up psychoacoustics as an example of the way we don't hear the way microphones do. While you could abuse them, it would be more obvious. In this case what we're getting is the audio equivalent of adversarial examples; see the link I gave for some visual examples. What's interesting there is that they are basically invisible to us, but surprisingly robust.

(As another sort of philosophical sidebar, this either proves, or provides very strong evidence, that whatever it is our brains are doing, it is not what deep learning nets are doing, nor anything else vulnerable to such trivial adversarial examples. I've seen adversarial examples against another technique that do seem to work against humans as well, but it requires such a distortion to the image that "I can't tell if that's a dog or a toaster" actually makes sense; it's not just some sort of attack against human vision or something, it's a fancy morphed thing halfway between the two that would probably confuse anything and anybody.)

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#95

Post by tcoff91 »

mkirklions wrote: post #76
sillyquiet wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep repeating this tired and offensive myth? I bought my iphone for the hardware and software capabilities that I judged to be the best for my use cases. And I am not the only one that actually had a non-trite reason, I am sure.

Is this a myth? What does apple have better than android in 2018?

Standby battery life. I switched because I got tired of pulling out my android phone and seeing it has lost an appreciable amount of battery in the last 45 mins just sitting in my pocket. When I"m not using my iphone the battery drain is minimal.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#96

Post by sudouser »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
jackhack wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but "Hey Spybot-Listening-To-Every-Conversation-In-This-Household-And-Building-A-Transcript-For-The-NSA" doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.

"Hey, NSA snitch"? "Hello Big Brother?"

that should be the activation command on all devices

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#97

Post by svnsets »

kfrzcode wrote: post #70
mkirklions wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got an iphone from work and I was shocked at how little Siri could do. Given all the hype from my friends and the commercials, I expected something outstanding. Nope, significantly worse than google's assistant. That was the start of my complete disappointment in apple as I continued to use an iphone and wonder- Why is anyone buying this?

The same reason people buy Coach bags etc... status and brand.

I'm sure there's some people that buy an iPhone for status (gotta have those blue iMessage bubbles), but I don't think it's any kind of majority. I've had an iPhone for the last 5 years or so because I've found there's better quality apps in the app store, and in the past their camera was way better than any other mainstream smartphones (not so much today though. The camera on the Pixel 2 looks way better IMO).

Also, Siri is a joke. If your priority in a smartphone is to make use of it's virtual assistant, then an iPhone is not for you.

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#98

Post by l1n »

mkirklions wrote: post #69
sailfast wrote: post #44

I can't recommend highly enough that everyone at least turn on the audible sound when their assistants are listening. At a minimum you should know the kinds of things that end up triggering the device. There's a really wide area of detection and it's interesting to see where that is. I would also recommending changing your default word at a minimum. Then again, I might also recommend ditching the device entirely but…

I want to get rid of my alexa, but my wife uses it as a kitchen timer. We literally dont use it for anything else. Might get one of those philips light sets since our living room is weird... Tbh, id rather not use alexa..

Not my project, but here's an offline voice assistant: https://hackaday.io/project/32425-modular-smart-speaker-assi...

Re: Alexa and Siri Can Hear Hidden Commands

#100

Post by 0xCMP »

crowbahr wrote: post #61
jackhack wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but "Hey Spybot-Listening-To-Every-Conversation-In-This-Household-And-Building-A-Transcript-For-The-NSA" doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.

Come now, on a tech and hacking website of all places we should all be better informed than this. There is a voice activation only chip tied directly into the lights that only listens for commands. Once the activation is heard it sends it off to the servers to get processed etc. With everyone scrutinizing the web traffic around them trying to prove NSA/Google spying with them we'd definitely have found something by n…

I can't find the article, but there was a post where someone turned on the Audible Alert of when it was listening and it began listening for a lot of times.

They also said they found a lot of recordings in their Google History that really shouldn't have been there.

Here's another article about the history: https://qz.com/526545/googles-been-quietly-recording-your-vo...

Post reply on HN