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It's been literally years since someone saying Alexa on a TV show or elsewhere have triggered my devices. Occasionally I've seen them switch to "listen", but they've gotten good at not reacting. I'm assuming part of it is that it's gotten very good at recognising who is speaking. E.g. my son and I tested the limits of it a while back by changing voices (it still correctly identified my son when he tried to change his…
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Google does it (only matching voices on the keyword); my Google home will ignore anyone else saying "ok Google", however if someone's yelling at me from another room or talking on the phone in the hallway, it's impossible to get anything useful out of it; it'll activate on the keyword and start processing whatever the first sounds it hears (dinner's ready, ok, ok, ok; I'm leaving n…
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#251I'm guessing there's something about how they're doing recognition of who is speaking that would make it hard to scale the cloud based speech recognition. Though I also notice that Alexa can answer more questions with the network down than it used to. Early on it was pretty much only the wake words, and then it'd given an error no matter what. Now it "listens" and will answer some requests to some degree without a network connection (e.g. if you ask to set an alarm it'll tell you the network is down and it can't set new alarms, but that it will still alert you, so it'd seem the full smarts of parsing an alarm request goes to the cloud, but it recognises at least enough to know you've asked about an alarm)