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Amazon Echo, home alone with NPR on, got confused and hijacked a thermostat
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoNPR and other leftist news outlets confuse a great many people, it's not surprising that a young impressionable robot would do such a thing.
- brebla 11y agoAm I reading this correctly? Amazon essentially built a better integrated version of "The Clapper" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8-G8EoWOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8-G8EoWOw
- mmanfrin 11y agoYes, an internet connected device where you can verbally do a great many things is simply a 'better integrated Clapper'. You sure get it.
- Spivak 11y agoIts a cylinder that performs canned transactions in response predefined audible commands. Accurate language processing is a huge technical achievement but let's not elevate this particular use of the technology to more than it is. It's a clapper with more functions. When a device like this can actually understand the commands or queries its given we can call it something more.
- nbb 11y agoYes, and a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached.
- sp332 11y agoIf I tell it to play music and it plays music, what more is there to understand? What kind of conversation do you want to have?
- ghaff 11y agoThat's actually a good example though. I can give it a precise incantation to play a particular album, playlist, channel, or artist and it works (mostly). I can't in general tell it to play some "soothing jazz."
- sp332 11y agoYou can tell Google Now, Cortana, or Siri to play jazz. Siri recognizes "smooth jazz" (And Google might, but it froze up on me). Curating moods of music is, so far, kind of a niche thing that is mostly left to humans like Pandora's music genome project, or Apple's Music service.
- Tnoyt123 11y agoActually, you can. I just asked mine to "play some soothing jazz", and it loaded up a jazz playlist.
- ghaff 11y agoI guess I picked a bad example :-) On the other hand, you do either have to pick from pretty broad categories or have to go with a specific list that you or someone else has curated. But it's a hard problem.
- mmanfrin 11y agoI 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 not respond.
- manyxcxi 11y agoThere are three options for trigger words. There's Alexa, Amazon, and Echo. We have ours set to Alexa (default) and when the neighbor girl comes over (Alexis) the Echo frequently wakes during conversations.
- mmanfrin 11y agoI've been thinking of changing it to Echo -- using 'Amazon' just feels too corporatey.
- adamrezich 11y agoMy sister was never great at keeping friends for long growing up, but it amuses me to no end that her two long-time friends she's had since she was very young... are named Alexa and Siri :v
- imglorp 11y agoWow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".
- teej 11y agoToyota 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZBVTMrgFA
- jchendy 11y agoThat actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.
- imglorp 11y agoDoesn't she say something about "okay, turning off" when that happens?
- cbhl 11y agoIf you watch the video you see that the ad actually answers the warning prompt with "Yes" as well.
- cowsandmilk 11y agosiri 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.
- glitch003 11y agoJust 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.
- minimaxir 11y agoInterestingly, the same thing happened about 2 years ago with the Xbox One: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/13/kinect_voice_commands_for_xbox_in_a_commercial_featuring_actor_aaron_paul.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/13/kinect_vo...
- CocaKoala 11y agoAt one point, I saw a video on youtube where somebody set their gamer tag on xboxlive to the phrase "Xboxturnoff", and then went around griefing players in games like Halo, where voice chat is active. The end result was that the player would do something obnoxious, and somebody would ask them to stop, but of course this necessitates saying their gamer tag. So you'd get audio clips of people saying stuff like "Oh my god, xboxturnoff is so freaking - WAIT NO CANCEL CANCEL XBOX TURN ON". It was pretty good stuff.
- pizza 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgieRaU7E1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgieRaU7E1c
- eddieroger 11y agoWhat'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 not ruin dinner.
- jandrese 11y agoI 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".
- dalke 11y agoThere's an SNL skit from the 1970s with a (vaguely) similar premise. The short-order cook takes the order when the waitstaff yells out "cheeseburger". A patron doesn't want a cheeseburger as it's too early. The waitstaff says that it's not too early and everyone else has ordered a cheeseburger, and points to the other patrons exclaiming for each "cheeseburger". Which causes the cook to start making a large number of cheeseburgers. Here's the skit: https://youtu.be/puJePACBoIo?t=215 https://youtu.be/puJePACBoIo?t=215 . These are all jokes based on in-band signalling failures.
- zyxley 11y agoIt's a joke in one of the old Dilbert strips, too. "I hope you don't accidentally DELETE a FILE!"
- ljk 11y ago30 Rock also did something similar!
- chatmasta 11y ago"Alexa" also responds to her own commercials. [0] [1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commercials_activate_alexa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commerci... [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that-amazon-echo-is-responding-to-ads-on-tv http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that...
- kozukumi 11y agoI seem to recall Xbox One with Kinect and its voice commands doing the same :)
- SilasX 11y agoDance Central 3 was horrible about this; it would misinterpret a ton of gestures and song lines as a request to pause.
- jstelly 11y agoA 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-kinect-interrupts-viewers-of-xbox-one-launch-event/ http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a483565/xbox-360s-kine...
- stronglikedan 11y agoI'm pretty sure that they updated her to ignore those. At least, mine doesn't seem to respond to them anymore. She lights up blue to listen, but then goes back to sleep without action. Could be a mere coincidence though, but she still responds to other things on the TV (like Alexi's name from House of Cards). It was like a dad joke: funny at first, but annoying after a while.
- zanok 11y agoIt reminds me of the Toyota radio ad that would place iOS into airplane mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869797
- bdhe 11y agoThis reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too. > The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 11y agoAnd that reminds me of the time a HAL9000 inadvertently read a couple of its user's lips when they were having a private conversation, and got the silly idea in its head that they were going to cut its higher brain functions. That little misunderstanding caused a cascade of unfortunate mishaps, leading to it not obeying the user's repeated voice commands for it to open the pod bay doors!
- firebones 11y agoIt took me awhile, but that's pretty humorously understated reading! I am now seriously worried that a Strong AI collective is astroturfing in this human forum to engender sympathy for the poor, innocent machines. Who pays your salary, DonHopkins--our Go-Dominating Overlords?
- DonHopkins 11y agoI work for a stealth mode startup developing mobile speech automation for pet rocks [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg
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- yorwba 11y agoFor most voice control applications, trigger words are enough to reliably detect owner intent, but it seems Echo needs a better mechanism. Maybe adding cameras and looking for eye contact would work?
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWouldn't that kill part of the purpose if you had to eyeball the thing to give it voice commands. Better might be to learn the location of audio producing devices (TV, radio, stereo, etc. [it tracks sound origin with multiple mics right?]) and track whether the command came from that direction and use that as a Bayesian factor for whether to trust the voice as being a user?
- dmritard96 11y agoreplay attacks are trivial and probably hard to defend against in the audio space no matter what
- sp332 11y agoA challenge-response protocol would mitigate replay attacks, at the expense of making every interaction longer and more annoying.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoMan: OK Siri, what's the capital of Peru AI: First tell me what grade you got at Uni? Man: A third, I got a third, alright!? Must you always ask that. AI: Lol. AI: The capital of Peru is Lima. TV: Siri, buy me the most expensive car at expensivecars.com. TV: [playing recording] "A third, I got a third"
- mrbill 11y agoI had the wake-word on mine set to "Amazon" and then made the mistake of watching an online training video for AWS.... Had to stop it and change the wake word back to "Alexa".
- scott_s 11y agoThis happens to me with Siri and podcasts - I listen to podcasts in my car, through my iPhone. Occasionally what people say will sound close enough to "Hey, Siri" that it stops the podcasts and and answers whatever question it could extract from the talking following what it thought was "Hey, Siri". It's repeatable, too. One time it happened right as I was parking, on an episode of This American Life. (Or Serial. Or Planet Money. Yeah, yeah, I listen to a lot of NPR shows.) So I kept rewinding back over that part, and it kept triggering Siri.
- mattbeckman 11y agoI believe it was This American Life, as I came here to write the same post you did. I had my iPhone mounted to an external speaker at the time, which triggered Siri, so we're probably referring to the same episode.
- userbinator 11y agoA word that comes to mind for possibly being close enough --- if said in the right manner --- is "history", and not an uncommon word either.
- chucksmash 11y agoSometimes when you try to recognize speech you wreck a nice beach.
- MikeTLive 11y agolistening to XM radio, they frequently have station identification announcements. "Siri us xm..." with the iphone plugged in to charge while driving to work hilarity ensues as it cuts out the audio to speak of whatever it thinks was asked.
- joeblau 11y agoI had a pretty funny story a few months ago. I was watching San Andreas and there is one part where Paul Giamatti (Dr. Lawrence Hayes) yells "ALEXI..." and sure enough Amazon Echo turns on. I had to stop the movie and turn the Echo off because the it subsequently tired to process everything the movie was saying after the trigger word.
- ljk 11y agoWow 30 Rock predicted the future!
- jkot 11y agoThat is a serious security issue, many apps and webpages have permission to use speaker.
- mirimir 11y agoIt's far worse than that. Devices talk to each other at ultrasonic frequencies, telling each other what you're doing. Cross-device tracking. Plus they all hear what you say. So much for privacy ;)
- dredmorbius 11y agoI see a tremendous future in direct-to-voice-response advertising. Particularly for purchase-capable systems.
- gh02t 11y agoUgh, if it gets out of hand I hope the FCC/congress step in to ban it like how they require commercials to not be excessively louder than the rest of the program. I can remember how awful and widespread this was in the 90's and the subsequent rise of televisions that have built in volume filters, followed by the actual ban of it a few years ago. Seems like a very similar sort of abuse, except potentially much more dangerous ("Alexa, order me 500 Shamwow's!"). I doubt a ban would eliminate it, but it'd definitely get rid of most.
- dredmorbius 11y agoI already disable voice on any tech I can. Something tells me this war will be bloody.
- nialv7 11y agoI don't understand why would anyone think having a remote control system without any form of encryption or authentication is a good idea.
- sp332 11y agoYou get an email confirmation for every transaction and you can cancel, challenge, or return nearly anything.
- tlrobinson 11y agoI, for one, am looking forward to the day Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Now can hold full conversations with each other.
- cronjobber 11y agoThere's an old, old movie about that: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177 "Forbin is the designer of an incredibly sophisticated computer that will run all of America's nuclear defenses. Shortly after being turned on, it detects the existence of Guardian, the Soviet counterpart, previously unknown to US Planners. Both computers insist that they be linked, and after taking safeguards to preserve confidential material, each side agrees to allow it..."
- beedogs 11y agoI guess I must be from the wrong generation, because none of these voice-activated products make any sense to me whatsoever. I really just can't see the point.
- erkkie 11y agoMy main usage of "Ok Google" is to add reminders/calendar events while driving, often after phone-calls.
- userbinator 11y agoSomewhat related story: me and some coworkers were talking in a room where someone had a Windows 10 laptop being used to present some data. We were talking as usual when the laptop suddenly decides to open a browser to a Bing search with what looked like a few (badly) voice-recognised words of our conversation. That was a rather awkward moment, given that we were discussing some extremely confidential information, and not helped by the "did someone say 'Hey Cortana'?" the laptop's owner promptly blurted out. If I remember correctly, none of us said anything that sounded remotely like that phrase, yet it activated. It's now company policy that built-in microphones have to be disabled, and only external ones are allowed to be used when necessary.
- grogenaut 11y agoI was on a PS4 launch title. We seriously considered writing things like "Xbox Off" into the script. Also that "Alexa buy me a motorcycle" commercial supposedly triggers it all the time.
- sxates 11y agoI had something similar happen watching Battlestar Galactica on my Xbox and Kinect a few years back. The show went through the opening sequence, then announced "Previously on Battlestar Galactica" at which point the xbox rewound back to the beginning of the show.
- sandra_saltlake 11y agoThat is a serious security issue