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

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

#71

Post by delecti »

chasd00 wrote: post #11
CharlesW wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#72

Post by akira2501 »

nimbius wrote: post #34

why not just embed an ultrasonic tone sequence that invalidates the Alexa invocation?

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.

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

#73

Post by Rychard »

ghaff wrote: post #62
Rychard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by rootusrootus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
jrockway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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, o…

> 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.

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

#75

Post by ghaff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
jrockway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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, o…

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.)

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

#76

Post by ars »

incanus77 wrote: post #57
btgeekboy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions that the Echo does something similar locally, so the cloud-side part is an additional layer.

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. M…

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.

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

#77

Post by brian_cloutier »

candiddevmike wrote: post #60
paxys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?

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

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

#78

Post by iamacyborg »

bboygravity wrote: post #54
paxys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?

Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.

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

#79

Post by googlryas »

itqwertz wrote: post #50

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 c…

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?

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

#80

Post by saghm »

kccqzy wrote: post #35
remram wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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