Burger King Runs Ad Triggering Google Home Devices; Google Shuts It Down (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @01:05PM from the not-on-my-watch dept.

Burger King unveiled a new advertisement earlier today designed to trigger users' Google Home devices. The ad specifically used the Google Home trigger phrase "Okay, Google" to ask "What is the Whopper burger?," thus triggering the Google Assistant to read off the top result from Wikipedia. But less than three hours after Burger King launched the ad, Google disabled the functionality. The Verge reports: As of 2:45PM ET, Google Home will no longer respond when prompted by the specific Burger King commercial that asks "What is the Whopper burger?" It does, however, still respond with the top result from Wikipedia when someone else (i.e., a real user) other than the advertisement asks the same question. Google has likely registered the sound clip from the ad to disable unwanted Home triggers, as it does with its own Google Home commercials.

1 of 191 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Shouldn't the title read.... by The+MAZZTer · 2017-04-12 13:54 · Score: 4, Informative

Google can already do strict voice recognition, so I expect in the near future newer devices will have this enabled all the time by default to prevent things like this... also, so they can tie queries to specific people for data mining purposes, of course.