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Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

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Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#31

Post by cookiecaper »

tibbon wrote: post #27
rat87 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck that shut. If airplane mode is turned on and my GPS disabled as I'm close to the my right turn you better believe I'll be distracted. A better solution would be a true hands free mode that prevented touch input from working while driving.

Does airplane mode disable the GPS? GPS is a passive receiving of radiowaves, so I'm guessing not? (according to Apple, prior to 8.2 it did turn it off. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204234 )

Directions require more than your satellite coordinates. Map services are frequently polling servers for traffic conditions, new tiles for the map, and so on. You'd hope that these can fall back gracefully but I wouldn't put it past them to not. If you activate airplane mode and disable your phone's cellular connection, even if your phone doesn't disable the GPS receiver, directions may stop working.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#32

Post by imglorp »

jchendy wrote: post #18
teej wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota ran an anti-distracted driving radio ad where they did this. The ad narrator says "Hey Siri, please turn airplane mode on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZBVTMrgFA

That actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.

Doesn't she say something about "okay, turning off" when that happens?

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#33

Post by cowsandmilk »

jchendy wrote: post #18
teej wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota ran an anti-distracted driving radio ad where they did this. The ad narrator says "Hey Siri, please turn airplane mode on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZBVTMrgFA

That actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.

siri has itself trained to a single user's voice. I've never had anyone else's voice activate my phone with "Hey Siri". Admittedly, it usually takes me saying "Hey Siri" 3 times before it recognizes my voice, but I'm 100% certain a radio ad would get no response from my phone.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#34

Post by mmanfrin »

secabeen wrote: post #24
mmanfrin wrote: post #4

I think they need to pick a different name. 'Alexa' is very easy to trigger with other names, and reliably activates when I am watching any show with a character named 'Alex', 'Alexy', etc. One side effect I've noticed is that they seem to have tried to account for it, which has made the Echo less responsive to actual requests; a few times I've stood in front of it yelling 'ALEXA' trying to get it to stop and it does…

Alexa is not that easy compared to other names. Can you identify a single word that Alexa rhymes with? It's very hard to select a good wake word.

It's not about rhyming, it's about the dominant sounds. The 'al-' is faint, and factors less in to triggering than the 'X-ah' -- so a show could be talking about 'his [Ex a]ccepted the apology' and it would trigger. Pretty much any 'X' sound followed by a shwa would trigger it.

/Xə/ == triggering.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#35

Post by sliverstorm »

cookiecaper wrote: post #31
tibbon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does airplane mode disable the GPS? GPS is a passive receiving of radiowaves, so I'm guessing not? (according to Apple, prior to 8.2 it did turn it off. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204234 )

Directions require more than your satellite coordinates. Map services are frequently polling servers for traffic conditions, new tiles for the map, and so on. You'd hope that these can fall back gracefully but I wouldn't put it past them to not. If you activate airplane mode and disable your phone's cellular connection, even if your phone doesn't disable the GPS receiver, directions may stop working.

Works fine on my Android. I regularly lose cellular reception in the mountains, and it continues to work. Sometimes the tiles are low-res, but still readable. I would expect Apple would design around the same contingency, along with poor cellular service along more remote areas of the Interstate.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#36

Post by SilasX »

kozukumi wrote: post #14
chatmasta wrote: post #13

"Alexa" also responds to her own commercials. [0] [1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commerci... [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that...

I seem to recall Xbox One with Kinect and its voice commands doing the same :)

Dance Central 3 was horrible about this; it would misinterpret a ton of gestures and song lines as a request to pause.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#37

Post by jandrese »

eddieroger wrote: post #12

What's really great about this is that it's a joke on the future that's been predicted so many times already, my favorite of which being the last vignette on Disney's Carousel of Progress. The future family is talking about points in a video game, and the oven hears it and turns the temperature way up, ruining another family Christmas dinner - the joke being that this convenience was finally going to make Dad able to…

I remember this joke going way back to the DOS days. The story goes that a developer was demoing his new voice control system for the computer when from the back of the room a voice shouted "FORMAT C COLON", followed by another voice shouting "YES".

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#38

Post by jstelly »

kozukumi wrote: post #14
chatmasta wrote: post #13

"Alexa" also responds to her own commercials. [0] [1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commerci... [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that...

I seem to recall Xbox One with Kinect and its voice commands doing the same :)

A voice command demostration during the launch event for the Xbox One caused problems for customers watching on their Xbox 360s (their kinect acted on the demo's commands):

http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a483565/xbox-360s-kine...

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#39

Post by glitch003 »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #33
jchendy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.

siri has itself trained to a single user's voice. I've never had anyone else's voice activate my phone with "Hey Siri". Admittedly, it usually takes me saying "Hey Siri" 3 times before it recognizes my voice, but I'm 100% certain a radio ad would get no response from my phone.

Just want to chime in and say that I can activate my girlfriends iPhone by saying "Hey Siri" in a girly sounding voice. It's trained to only her voice but I can trigger it. So it's not foolproof as you make it seem.

Re: Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat

#40

Post by ianferrel »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #33
jchendy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.

siri has itself trained to a single user's voice. I've never had anyone else's voice activate my phone with "Hey Siri". Admittedly, it usually takes me saying "Hey Siri" 3 times before it recognizes my voice, but I'm 100% certain a radio ad would get no response from my phone.

My wife's phone regularly (maybe once a month), starts listening in response to me saying something, which isn't even "Hey Siri", despite never training with my voice. My voice does not sound anything like my wife's.

So, I think the error rate is simply not low enough to make conclusive claims about what it might or might not do.

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