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

Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

amazon.science

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 128 posts

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#11

Post by chasd00 »

CharlesW wrote: post #10
xuaihua wrote: post #2

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.

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.)

> 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.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#13

Post by _ea1k »

atkailash wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#14

Post by jmole »

danpalmer wrote: post #4

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 so…

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!!”

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#16

Post by AnimalMuppet »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #5

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?

Wow. That's a thought.

And if you can make it crash, then you can maybe make it run shellcode instead...

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#17

Post by jcutrell »

atkailash wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#19

Post by dpkirchner »

jcutrell wrote: post #17
atkailash wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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.)

Post reply on HN